Glimpses of a writer's past, given as though discreetly decanted. This memoir by the New York novelist (Solo Faces, 1979, etc.) and short-story writer feels more like a first-person elegy, with all the poignancy available to one who writes in advance of life's closing. A sadness, half-suppressed in the telling, flows through the pages. The tone is most persuasive whenever Salter's story itself takes melancholy turns—when, for instance, he writes of his editor-friend Ben Sonnenberg's decline from multiple sclerosis or when he alludes to his difficulties and failures as a writer. But at times the narrator seems to long to absent himself from the narrative, perhaps to escape the pain inherent in anyone's excavation of his past. At these times, lacking an integral structure, the writing loses momentum. And although the book is packed with characters—from Irwin Shaw to Robert Redford to scads of femmes fatales, portrayed with a courtly tact—it seems too often to depend on scenes and observations saturated with a rather dated literary perfume. The scent bears traces of Hemingway's literary stoicism and Fitzgerald's lyric delicacy. Many of the continental settings and scenes belong to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, too, especially those involving wartime (the West Pointeducated Salter was a pilot) and Paris, where his reveries of wine, women, and belles lettres are generically familiar to a fault. Women are in general a weak point for Salter here, rarely seeming more than seductive ghosts. For instance, he writes condescendingly of Sharon Tate that ``if she was not a very good housekeeper, she was pure of heart and her flesh was a poem. One felt that she could be enjoyed in all the ways that one can enjoy a woman.'' Though almost too patrician to be true, the book includes descriptions and characterizations that demonstrate how good Salter can be when he dispenses with his courtly reserve. A connoisseur's view of himself and others. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-375-50015-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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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