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ANGEL AT THE FENCE

Name: ANGEL AT THE FENCE
Author: Herman Rosenblat
ISBN: 978-0-425-22581-3

THE TRUE STORY OF A LOVE THAT SURVIVED

by Herman Rosenblat ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2009

Simple, unpretentious prose makes Rosenblat’s memoir all the more potent.

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A survivor’s memoir of the Shoah.

Rosenblat’s family, like the other Polish Jews, had tried to flee during the late 1930s, but they did not manage to escape the tightening circles of Nazi oppression. His father died of typhus in May 1942. Five months later, all the Jews in their ghetto were ordered to report for deportation in the middle of the night. Thirteen-year-old Herman claimed to be 16 and was selected for slave labor with his three older brothers. Their mother was sent directly to the death camp at Treblinka. She pushed Herman away when he begged to go with her, pretending to be angry so he would join his brothers. Only later, when he marched away and saw tears streaming down her face, did he realize what she had done. The Rosenblat brothers endured at Buchenwald and Theresienstadt. Remembered six decades later, their story is still vibrant and vivid. The author recalls his sleeping dreams and the waking nightmare of real life in a concentration camp. Though there are many astonishing twists in his narrative, there is none more remarkable than the tale of Rosenblat’s first two encounters with the young woman who became his wife—after they went on a blind date nine years later in Coney Island. (The young survivor had made his way to New York after being transported to England.) The author’s personal history attests to his recovery from a scarifying confrontation with systematic evil and murder on a cosmic scale. He leaves it to the reader to decide what his wartime experiences meant, then and now.

Simple, unpretentious prose makes Rosenblat’s memoir all the more potent.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-425-22581-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)