A moving account of an inauspicious start to life.
In this memoir, a woman recounts a tumultuous childhood roiled by war and an abusive father.
McCarthy was only 3 years old when World War II came to a close, an experience that haunted the remainder of her childhood. Forced to flee Schweidnitz, Poland, for Bremerhaven, Germany, to elude the advance of Russian soldiers notorious for their brutality, she remembers growing up around occupying American forces, whose cultural imprint seeped into their lives—even “American flavours found their way into our kitchen.” Her grandfather Josef had been a supporter of Hitler. Her father, Alfred, was a mercurially brutal alcoholic—when he was home, the “atmosphere in the apartment was so thick with tension that the air became almost too poisonous to breathe.” She loathed her father—after her parents divorced when she was 18 years old, she didn’t see him for over 30 years—and resented her mother, Agnes, for not shielding her from his cruelty: “But why did Mom never intervene? How could she have listened to her children’s screams without interfering? And what went through her mind when she saw the bruises on our faces and limbs? She never said a word.” The author paints a vivid tableau of life under multiple tyrannies—her family’s existence upturned by the Nazis, the Russians, and the relentless despotism of her father. Dire financial straits and food rationing shaped her early years, and she felt a profound mistrust of adults. But despite the often embittered depictions of her “horrid family,” she managed to find solace in her growing love of books, acting, and the art of storytelling. McCarthy’s remembrance is impressionistic in character and, as a result, can be somewhat desultory. Nevertheless, she delivers a powerful portrait of a turbulent time in history and a poignant account of a child’s awkward attempts to make sense of the chaos. Readers will be touched by her relentless search for the “independence I so fervently craved.”
A moving account of an inauspicious start to life.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2021
ISBN: 979-8464485891
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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