A charming, if unfocused, memoir that offers readable reflections from start to finish.
A 96-year-old Canadian physicist and entrepreneur looks back on his long life in this debut memoir.
Burgener gives a thorough accounting of his life, from his birth in 1917 through his childhood, education, later family life and extensive career in the physical sciences. His main career focus was spectrographic sampling and analysis, and although he writes mostly about the workings and growing complexity of the spectrography business, he also takes the time to briefly describe the science behind his life’s work. Throughout, he sketches in important historical events, including both world wars, the Cold War and the 1945 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and their effect on his life and career. Burgener has a sharp mind, and his writing style and voice reflect the straightforward, rational approach he describes in his work. His sentences are clear and unadorned, if a touch lengthy at times (as in the book’s subtitle, “107 Years of Interesting Anecdotes in the Life of a Canadian Physicist Who Changed the World with Spectroscopy and Analytical Chemistry”). As a result, his prose is easy to absorb. More to the point, Burgener’s life is truly fascinating, filled with relevant work, travel all over the world and a family life that was clearly fulfilling. The picture that emerges is of a man who’s humble and grateful for the life he’s led. His story is so wide-ranging, however, that it lacks focus; it feels more like a compilation of memories than a unified narrative, and some readers may wish that the memoir had a more coherent framework. Most others, however, will simply enjoy Burgener’s clear thinking and grateful appreciation.
A charming, if unfocused, memoir that offers readable reflections from start to finish.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1460206324
Page Count: 272
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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