Tobacco chaw and human weighings by a professor of English (Texas Christian Univ.) who wonders whether he exists, and who finds the greater public crises of past decades writ small in his own life. Corder is a kind of down-home Kafka whose fingers skim the air in hopes of netting some pollen from a phantasmal 20th-century life. His clear, uncluttered style never tires the reader, though one keeps waiting for a more passionate quickening. Vague confessions arise: ``Perhaps I am the twentieth century, mostly shallow, mostly superficial, incapable of great art or much of anything, genuinely, thoroughly mediocre, watching at a distance as the trivial becomes monstrous, the monstrous trivial.'' One palpates such writing for feeling beyond word play, and it's not always there. Even so, Corder unearths enough of his heart to keep us hungry for some big dish that may lie ahead. What we get are linked epiphanies, daisy chains of homecomings for a Ulysses who never left. Every great change, Corder finds, brings nostalgia in its wake, and he charts his own sighs as wave-patterns in the culture. One sigh springs from his own deconstruction: ``Language is orphaned from its speaker'' and lodges ``in the perceiving minds of readers....Authors...now fade away into nothing.'' We win such small leavings, he warns. ``Can I get a witness? Can you? Can she, or he? In texts that are absent?'' Through haze, Corder finds himself in childhood comic books, road maps, snapshots, the Depression, the Lux Radio Theater, the Holocaust—and in forlorn thoughts of a daughter now far off, whose skin temperature he traces daily in weather reports. Subliminal grieving for a life lived in ribs of dust.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8203-1419-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1992
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
