All but forgotten today, Alfred Lawson (1869-1954)-master of hype, economic reformer, founder of the quasi-religious School of Lawsonomy, ``Magic Man of Baseball,'' ``Columbus of the Air''-was renowned during the first half of the century. This entertaining biography by Henry (Political Science/Mount Mercy College), despite lack of access to Lawson's papers, is a revealing portrait of ``a uniquely American,'' self-created man. Henry divides Lawson's life into three stages. First come his years as a relatively successful minor league pitcher and manager, 1888-1908 (he later worked as a promoter and organizer of a number of teams and leagues). Lawson's second career, in aviation (1908-1929), grew out of his love of and belief in flying as a cure for mankind's ills. His magazines, Fly and Aircraft (a term he claimed to have coined), were, as Henry notes, a popular mix of pseudoscience, real know-how, and Babbitt-style ``boosterism.'' Generally credited with conceiving the idea of commercial airliners, the Lawson Aircraft Corporation built a 16-passenger plane that Lawson flew on a 2,000-mile, perilous promotional tour in 1919. Though his plans-as usual- ended in financial disaster, Lawson actually had contracts with the US military and the postal service. The third stage began in the 1930's following the publication of his first reform treatises, with the development of the Direct Credits Society, a crusade to oust the financiers from capitalist society through a kind of socialistic-egalitarianism. His quest to perfect human nature, Lawsonomy, grew out of this half-baked utopianism. k Part ``new physics,'' part religion, Lawsonomy would lead to a ``new species'' watched over and led by ``one cosmic mastermind,'' ``God's eternal gift to man,'' Alfred Lawson. His controversial Des Moines University of Lawsonomy (later resurrected and still existing in Racine, Wisconsin) closed after his death; fewer than 300 followers survive today. The aptness of Henry's admonition ``to reject [Lawson's] claims of greatness,'' but not to ignore his remarkable life is borne out by this engrossing, pleasing slice of Americana. (Thirty-three b&w photographs and nine drawings.)
Pub Date: April 30, 1991
ISBN: 0-87745-312-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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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