Love the magazine or not, Hubbell’s memoir deserves a read.
A memoir from someone who knew Reader’s Digest inside and out, including its legendary founder William “Wally” Roy DeWitt Wallace.
Veteran journalist Hubbell offers stories about the place where he happily worked for 40 years. Hubbell (born 1927) was a University of Minnesota journalism grad who, after a couple of false starts, submitted an article to the Reader’s Digest. They liked it, Wally hired him, and the rest is his career. It seems almost a charmed life, and he would surely admit as much. Hubbell wasn’t an editor for the Digest; instead, he wrote original investigative pieces and quickly made a name for himself with expertise in military and political matters. In these pages, one finds stories about tense moments in the Cold War, the Vietnam War, PGA highlights (Hubbell loved the game of golf), presidential quirks, Edward Teller and the strategic Defense Initiative, and also biographical stuff about Hubbell’s growing up, all of which forms an engaging picture of an ambitious young man’s rise. He seemed to know everyone who was anyone, especially because, as he repeatedly points out here, working for enormously popular Reader’s Digest provided ready access to those in power (particularly those who shared the Digest’s patriotic, establishmentarian take on things). Although there were some liberals at the Digest—the Vietnam War showed the fault lines—Hubbell was basically conservative, like Wally. Hubbell is almost idolatrous of Wally, and it is hard to fault him on that score: the man was a genial genius at what he did. Aside from a few typos, the narrative has a handful of awkward sentences: e.g., “We are at sea for perhaps an hour, and I am standing near the Skipper, who is standing on a slightly raised platform in the Control Room, near his periscope, which is not up.” Hubbell also doesn’t follow standard usage for periods, commas, and quotation marks, which might distract readers. Still, the story’s a good one. Wally died in 1981, and while he tried to protect the legacy of the Digest, gradually the managerial side won out over the editorial vision that had been true to Wally’s vision. Today, in and out of bankruptcy, Wally’s brainchild is on life support.
Love the magazine or not, Hubbell’s memoir deserves a read.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1484913017
Page Count: 464
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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