Was Jerzy Kosinski a spy? Did he fabricate a childhood for himself in order to cash in on the Holocaust industry? Did he even write his own books? Sloan (English/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago), a personal acquaintance of Kosinski's, investigates the full range of questions raised by his subject's ``enigmatic'' personality and professional activities. Culminating in his suicide in 1991, Kosinski's life as a writer and all-around sharp operator was driven by controversy, some of which he intricately plotted and carried out himself, some of which simply happened to him. A 1982 article in the Village Voice challenged the autobiographical veracity of Kosinski's most famous novel, The Painted Bird, shaking the meticulously constructed foundation of the myth that was Jerzy Kosinski. Empathetic but critical, Sloan provides a steadily fascinating account, starting with Kosinski's childhood in Poland and sorting out his sundry roles as writer, actor, photographer, Yale professor, husband, New York celebrity, polo player, jet-setter, possible CIA snitch, and internationally renowned fornicator. At the center of Sloan's reading of this complicated man is a tale of personal relationships—the unceasing search for father figures, the tendency to seek out mother-types in his permanent liaisons with women, and his obsessive and self-destructive behavior. The Freudian scheme seems a little pat. In addition, Sloan's literary judgment is not persuasive. Though Kosinski's fiction is demonstrably second-rate (and though Kosinski had so much outside assistance in producing the stuff, in some sense it isn't exactly his own work), Sloan means for us to accept his view that Kosinski ought to be thought of in a group including Camus, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. But such dubious claims make no real difference in the success of this biography. Its strength lies in the astonishing life of its subject. Kosinski may not have been much of a writer and was undoubtedly something of a charlatan, but his biographer reveals a life that reads like a wonderfully picaresque fiction. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-93784-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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
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
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