A wryly eloquent memoir of world travel and the joys, and difficulties, of returning home.
An award-winning writer’s account of a life lived in flight from a Louisiana birthplace that ultimately drew him back.
A fifth-generation New Orleans native, Nolan’s (Higher Ground, 2011, etc.) Southern roots ran deep. But by 1968, he realized that his birthplace was as much a “jailhouse” as the psychiatric ward where his mother’s doctor had temporarily confined him for the rebellious behavior he saw as “sick.” After his girlfriend and an ACLU lawyer helped him get out, he took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco. There, he befriended members of the theater group the Cockettes and lost his “gay cherry” in the process. After trips to Colombia, Nolan then became involved in political protests against the American government’s nefarious involvement in Latin America, especially the democratically elected government of Chile. By the mid-1970s, he had become an itinerant professor, fallen in love with a dancer, and moved to Guatemala. His association with political dissenters led to arrest and incarceration, but his escape-artist talent saved him from “certain death” yet again, and he was able to go free. However, like the forebears who had “move[d] across oceans” in the 19th century to establish a life in the French Quarter, Nolan soon found himself doing much the same. His first crossing was to Spain then, a few years later, to China, a country from which he fled after a semester of teaching at a university where he was excluded from planning a revolution for which he hungered. Eventually he returned to New Orleans only to watch his birthplace, already caught in a “boozy maelstrom of guns and drugs, murder and corruption,” struggle in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Filled with eccentric characters—many of whom Nolan memorializes with included black-and-white photographs—and outrageous situations, Nolan’s work also offers serious, often sardonic reflections on such diverse topics as race, family, consumerism, progress, and the fate of a generation of countercultural idealists.
A wryly eloquent memoir of world travel and the joys, and difficulties, of returning home.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4968-1127-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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