Despite the subjects’ inspiring stories, the author fails to create a sense of purpose.
Today Show fourth-hour co-host Kotb (Hoda, 2010) tells the story of six people who faced extraordinary challenges in life and turned their lives around.
The stories are heartbreaking. One woman’s partner physically abused her for many years before she found the courage to stand up to him. After she broke away from him to regain custody of her children, she lost 325 pounds through exercise and diet. She now travels around the country talking to victims of domestic abuse. The second story is that of a young woman who fought two cancers and managed to preserve her fertility through freezing her eggs. Horrified that no doctor or nurse had discussed that option with her, she founded a nonprofit that raises awareness about fertility options for cancer patients. Another devastating story is that of a man who lost his sister on 9/11 at the exact same moment he was helping a burning woman stay alive. One story that does not fit with the others is that of Roxanne Quimby, founder of Burt’s Bees. In the afterword, Kotb writes that Quimby went from “organic rags to riches.” While that is true, Quimby says that her poverty was a product of her own doings, as she chose to live in the forest to grow her own food. While Quimby is accomplished, it seems disrespectful and odd to put her story alongside those who faced challenges the world threw at them without giving them a choice.
Despite the subjects’ inspiring stories, the author fails to create a sense of purpose.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5603-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
