Personal stories of eight Jewish men and women—who, as children, survived the Holocaust—are the frame for a study of the hardships and bigotry they faced after liberation. In a style similar to his Hidden Children (1993), Greenfeld tells this story in chronological order, organizing his chapters into Liberation, After the Liberation, The DP Camps, and, finally, The Survivors: An Afterword. While each of these victims experienced detainment and liberation in different ways, their stories represent a sampling of thousands of lives. The first chapter introduces each: Ann Shore, born Hania Goldman, who was freed from a hiding place in a hayloft where she had spent two years, to Larry Rosenbach, who escaped a death march from Flossenburg to Dachau. Others include Judith Bihaly, one of the hidden children, forced to disguise her Jewishness even before the war. This detail becomes a significant theme throughout the narrative as Greenfeld reinforces the existence of overwhelming prejudice and discrimination that was a significant part of Jewish life before and after liberation. As a result, most of these children found themselves in situations almost as horrifying as their lives during the war. While the format makes these individual lives difficult to follow, the depictions of living behind fences in poorly equipped displaced-persons camps or being sent home, only to find a new family unwilling to budge, will chill the soul and leave a lasting impression. These children survived to tell their stories, but Greenfeld makes it abundantly clear how many did not and why. (Nonfiction. 11+)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-17752-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A remarkable biography.
The story of a flawed, complicated man.
The son of a distant Minnesota congressman and a demanding, well-educated mother, young Charles Lindbergh grew up shuttling among the family farm, his grandfather’s Detroit home, and Washington, D.C. Intelligent but uninterested in school, he began flying at age 19, getting involved in barnstorming and becoming an Air Service Reserve Corps officer. He used a combination of mechanical aptitude and moxie to successfully cross the Atlantic in a 1927 solo nonstop flight and was instantly propelled into worldwide celebrity. Success came at tremendous cost, however, when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered. Lindbergh was also his own enemy: His infatuation with eugenics led him into overt racism, open admiration for Hitler, and public denunciation of Jews. Fallen from grace, he nonetheless flew 50 clandestine combat missions in the South Pacific. He became an advocate for animal conservation but also had three secret families in addition to his acknowledged one. Fleming (Eleanor Roosevelt's in My Garage!, 2018, etc.) expertly sources and clearly details a comprehensive picture of a well-known, controversial man. Her frequent use of diaries allows much of the story to come through in Charles’ and his wife Anne’s own words. The man who emerges is hateable, pitiable, and admirable all at the same time, and this volume measures up to the best Lindbergh biographies for any audience.
A remarkable biography. (bibliography, source notes, picture credits, index) (Biography. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-64654-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a...
A lovely, lively historical survey that takes in Neanderthals, Hohenzollerns and just about everything in between.
In 1935, Viennese publisher Walter Neurath approached Gombrich, who would go on to write the canonical, bestselling Story of Art, to translate a history textbook for young readers. Gombrich volunteered that he could do better than the authors, and Neurath accepted the challenge, provided that a completed manuscript was on his desk in six weeks. This book, available in English for the first time, is the happy result. Gombrich is an engaging narrator whose explanations are charming if sometimes vague. (Take the kid-friendly definition of truffles: “Truffles,” he says, “are a very rare and special sort of mushroom.” End of lesson.) Among the subjects covered are Julius Caesar (who, Gombrich exults, was able to dictate two letters simultaneously without getting confused), Charlemagne, the American Civil War, Karl Marx, the Paris Commune and Kaiser Wilhelm. As he does, he offers mostly gentle but pointed moralizing about the past, observing, for instance, that the Spanish conquest of Mexico required courage and cunning but was “so appalling, and so shaming to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it,” and urging his young readers to consider that perhaps not all factory owners were as vile as Marx portrayed them to be, even though the good owners “against their conscience and their natural instincts, often found themselves treating their workers in the same way”—which is to say, badly.
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a fine conception and summarizing of the world’s checkered past for young and old.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-300-10883-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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