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OL' STROM

Name: OL' STROM
Author: Jack Bass
ISBN: 1-56352-523-2

AN UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF STROM THURMOND

by Jack Bass & Marilyn W. Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 14, 1998

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The life (so far) of a master politician who daily sets new records as the US Senate’s oldest and longest-serving member, now 96. Bass, an award-winning veteran South Carolina—based political writer, and Thompson, an investigations editor at the Washington Post, portray the controversial Thurmond as an unusual man of great political and physical courage (never a fence-sitter). Though long past draft age, he signed up the day after Pearl Harbor, joining the 82nd Airborne and taking part in the D-Day invasion of Utah Beach; he was wounded and highly decorated after linking up with the bloodied 4th Division. The authors then follow Thurmond’s long political career, from his governorship of South Carolina and his subsequent election to the Senate through his opposition to the Democrats” civil rights program and his ultimate abandonment of the Democrats for the Republican Party, through his later efforts to move with the times, obtaining every sort of federal assistance for his state. Bass and Thompson describe his reaching out to improve the lot of blacks and traditional black colleges. The book covers the nonagenarian’s personal life, as well, including his two marriages to women decades younger than himself. In sum, Thurmond emerges from this portrait as that rarity, a politician beloved by his constituents. (15 photos and illustrations)

Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1998

ISBN: 1-56352-523-2

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Longstreet

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998

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BORN SURVIVORS

THREE YOUNG MOTHERS AND THEIR EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF COURAGE, DEFIANCE, AND HOPE

by Wendy Holden ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2015

An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...

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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

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IN THE NAME OF GUCCI
by Patricia Gucci with Wendy Holden

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by Sheila Escovedo with Wendy Holden

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HAATCHI & LITTLE B
by Wendy Holden

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.