A gripping real-life tale of extraordinary courage that had an enduring impact.
Kansas teenagers rediscover a forgotten Holocaust heroine in this moving historical drama, based on a true story.
Irena Sendler, a Catholic welfare bureaucrat in German-occupied Poland, saved thousands of Jewish children during World War II by organizing a network that smuggled them out of the Warsaw Ghetto to live in convents, orphanages and private homes. Mayer’s superb novelization of her exploits elevates social work to the intensity of a spy thriller. Posing as a nurse, Sendler carries youngsters out in boxes and bags, hides them under soiled dressings and piles of corpses headed for the cemetery or secrets them away in a truck equipped with a dog trained to bark over their cries. She coolly bribes and bluffs her way past guards, though discovery means execution. In the midst of this deadly caper, Irena registers the horrors of the ghetto—the pitiless struggle for food, the families that quietly die off from starvation and the anguish of parents who realize they can save their children only by giving them up forever. (Sendler buried lists of children’s names and locations in jars, hoping to reunite them with parents, but most of their families perished.) Writing in vivid but restrained prose, Mayer describes this agonizing situation with understated pathos. In one spare, heartbreaking scene, a mother flings her infant blindly over the ghetto wall to the “Aryan” side as the last Jews are rounded up for transit to death camps. The author frames Irena’s saga inside an account of three Kansas high-school girls who wrote the titular playlet about her in 2000 as a class project that became an international sensation. As the teens try to imagine Irena’s unfathomably different circumstances, they find that her life resonates with their experiences of loss and shattered families. Mayer’s narrative eventually loses its way amid the hoopla over the Irena Sendler Project, but his rendition of Irena’s story has an inspirational power of its own.
A gripping real-life tale of extraordinary courage that had an enduring impact.Pub Date: March 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0984111312
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Long Trail
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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