In a brisk memoir, former Runner’s World columnist Bingham (Running for Mortals, 2007, etc.) recounts his transformation from overweight, chain-smoking couch potato to avid runner, cyclist and swimmer.
“A funny thing happened on my way to middle age. I became an athlete,” writes the author in the introduction to his exploration of adult-onset athleticism. Bingham recalls his struggle with basic sports at an early age, as swimming, basketball, baseball, even bowling, all proved difficult to master. “This was a heartbreaking moment,” the author writes, and led to a self-imposed “long period of sedentary confinement.” Despite achieving much success both personally and professionally, Bingham couldn’t help but feel something was missing. When one of his colleagues returned from a cycling trip aglow with joy and energy, he finally realized that his inactive lifestyle was responsible for the emptiness he felt. He immediately went out to purchase a bike and began cycling. Because his job required so much travel, however, Bingham took up running. His first run may have lasted only eight seconds, but “what I knew for sure was that even though I was awful at it, I liked running.” More than two decades and thousands of miles later, Bingham’s first race stands in his memory as the moment his life changed. More than a meditation on adult athleticism, this is a winning blend of wisdom and motivation.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-934030-73-8
Page Count: 212
Publisher: VeloPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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