Deeply thoughtful essays on literature’s gifts and consolations.
The New Yorker critic celebrates the richness of literature in his own life.
At once touching, elegant, and wise, the essays collected in this slim volume were originally delivered as lectures, the first three at Brandeis University and the fourth at the British Museum. Wood (Literary Criticism/Harvard Univ.; The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays, 2012, etc.) admires criticism that is “not especially analytical” but rather “a kind of passionate redescription.” His own reflections on a wide range of writers—including Woolf, Chekhov, Teju Cole, Henry Green, and Aleksandar Hemon—are infused with the passion of a voracious, highly discerning reader. Since childhood, he writes, books have “irradiated” his mind “by the energy of their compressed contents.” Growing up in the northern English town of Durham in a family of “engaged Christians,” Wood found in literature answers to the philosophical question “why?” that were not simply theological. When he was 15, he discovered Martin Seymour-Smith’s Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction. He was enthralled by the book’s gazetteer of writers and by the author’s terse evaluations of a novel’s greatness. Seymour-Smith was a literary “Siskel and Ebert.” For Wood, “great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphors and imagery.” Metaphors generate a “form of identification” that creates a reader’s empathy for fictional characters. Great writers, Wood adds, “rescue the life of things” from annihilation caused by fading memories and inattention. In “Secular Homelessness,” Wood considers the “strange distance, the light veil of alienation thrown over everything” that he feels in America, where he has lived for the past 18 years. He offers the word “homelooseness” as more accurate than homelessness or exile to describe that sense: a feeling that “the ties that bind one to Home have been loosened.”
Deeply thoughtful essays on literature’s gifts and consolations.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61168-742-2
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Brandeis Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
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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