Dick Tracy meets Jean-Paul Sartre in this deeply philosophical, deftly written account of the author’s 33 days confined in a cellar. Reemtsma (More Than a Champion: The Style of Muhammad Ali, 1998) is one of Germany’s leading intellectuals. On March 25, 1996, while walking to his office, he was assaulted, kidnapped, and later chained up in a cellar, where he’d spend the next 33 days awaiting a ransom hand-over. Reemtsma describes his horrific experience in a narrative that blends searing emotional honesty with an almost eerie intellectual detachment. Admitting his terror and utter powerlessness, Reemtsma subjects himself to meticulous self-examination. Seemingly trivial events, such as when the kidnappers take away his wristwatch, trigger philosophical musings: with a watch “you can focus your inner resources and conquer one hour after the other. Without a watch you are in a sea of time, out of sight of land.” The author’s intellect moves comfortably from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Sylvester Stallone, from American pop music to Renaissance art. Among other things, he uses his time in the cellar to examine the Cartesian concept of the individual and rejects it. He also considers the concepts of God, fate, and death. In a real sense, Reemtsma shared his dark cellar with the entire Western intellectual tradition. Yet the book contains considerable human drama, as the kidnappers try to elude the police and the author battles boredom and despair. When the initial efforts to hand over the ransom fail, the kidnappers threaten to murder Reemtsma. Finally, the ransom is paid, and the kidnappers drive him deep into the forest: “Car stops. Trunk opens. The thought again: Are they going to shoot me now?” He’s released, only to be swarmed by a ravenous press wanting to report his “feelings.” Reemtsma has written this complex book in part to confront those feelings. A relentlessly candid examination of one man’s heart and mind.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40098-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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