Romantic mulch for the lay reader.
Skimpy excursus of dubious scholarship mining the writer’s early and fairly forgettable college romance with a midwestern rich girl.
Fitzgerald’s later assertion that authors “have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives” and then hone their craft to repeat them “in a new disguise” is taken quite literally by West (English/Penn State; William Styron, 1998). A hundred pages—the rest is padding: diary entries, early short stories, letters, etc.—argue that Fitzgerald’s 1915 encounter with flirtatious visiting teenager Ginevra King at a party in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, was the definitive experience for Scott. West asserts, oxymoronically, that the two young people began an “intense romance, largely epistolary.” Scott was floundering at Princeton, she lived in Lake Forest, Illinois, so they rarely saw each other, save at football games. Though Ginevra’s letters recently came to light, along with her diary from these years, Scott’s were destroyed at his urging. Ginevra’s letters and diary entries contain mostly hormonal squeals—“Scott perfectly darling. Am dipped about”—but are occasionally revealing. “When you said I hadn’t any character,” she writes. “I consider that a personal insult.” West’s attempt to prove that their romance “was much more than a shallow flirtation” rests on the evidence of Scott’s subsequent female characters, pretty, fast, and vapid young women who bore equal resemblance to his wife Zelda or any of the Jazz Age girls he met in their circle. Yet, West asserts, Ginevra was important because her memory provided the budding writer with a device to evoke memories of loss and regret, and because the early recognition that as a poor boy he could never marry a rich girl like her sharpened his role as the “outsider.” It’s all a bit hazy and presumptuous, and the inclusion of an appendix delineating “Other Ginevras” in history (e.g., Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra de Benci) truly outrageous.
Romantic mulch for the lay reader.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6308-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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