Well-researched and powerful; challenges readers to consider the heroism and struggles of women’s resistance.
Gilbert provides a necessary, historically rich account of the Polish Jewish resistance via the perspectives of four women.
The author interviewed four Jewish women who survived the Holocaust: Manya Feldman, Faye Schulman, Lola Lieber, and Miriam Brysk. Each went on to live long lives abroad with various careers—a Hebrew School teacher, photographer, research scientist, and artist. In her debut nonfiction work, which borrows its title from a biblical phrase (“A woman of valor is robed in strength and dignity and faces the future with grace”), Gilbert immerses readers in the lives of her interviewees; photographs and helpful notes that provide historical background are interspersed throughout. Gilbert also “interviewed several Polish Gentile women who had been active in the Resistance” who asked that their stories not be included in the text. Each narrative is remarkable in its own right, extensively limning the horrors of World War II. In Manya Feldman’s chapter, for example, she tells Gilbert, “I would learn much later that my mother and precious little sisters were among the fifteen-thousand innocent Jews that were rounded up and sent to Sarny to be ‘liquidated’ during that hideous week in August 1942.” Faye Schulman describes her experiences developing horrific photos for the Nazis (“Before my eyes, appearing like phantoms on the photo paper, I again saw the heinous deaths of my neighbors, my friends…and my own precious family”); Lola Lieber recounts pretending to be Catholic and mimicking "Gentile mannerisms, and speech patterns." The chapter about Lieber includes an anecdote with Adolf Eichmann (“I was struck by how absolutely normal he looked”). Taken together, these recollections are intensely personal and thoughtfully compiled—richly descriptive of the women’s day-to-day experiences during the war while also providing historical context. Miriam Brysk’s story best epitomizes the text’s matter-of-fact style, as when she remembers her family’s arrival at a shared apartment in the town of Lublin: “There was very little furniture, but we felt safe and happy to be in our own apartment. We were especially happy to be able to celebrate our first Passover in six years.”
Well-researched and powerful; challenges readers to consider the heroism and struggles of women’s resistance.Pub Date: July 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73244-511-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Adira Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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