A love story that just keeps on going.
A sassy dame who sounds tough—but at heart isn’t—tells her life story.
Or some part of it. Originally issued by a local publisher in New Orleans, where the action takes place, Conner’s debut ruefully recalls her marriage, divorce, and a brown dog the couple shared. She offers an assertive gumbo of anecdotes, memories, and recipes, seasoned with sharp opinions and held together by the pet. The Mississippi-born author tries, at times even strains, to sound like a hard-bitten good ol’ girl who gives as good as she gets. She begins by explaining that the man she calls “ex-husband” gave her the dog after their divorce, supposedly to keep her safe in her new apartment. But ex-husband is never quite out of her life—she still helps out at the bar he runs, they still go out—and soon the animal spends most of its time with him. Ex-husband and dog go everywhere together: bars, parties, and restaurants where the waiters cut up steak for the pooch and serve it to him on the sidewalk. In a city famously tolerant of eccentricity, no one objects when the dog sits in the driver’s seat while ex-husband works the pedals and steers from the side. (Conner offers other anecdotes about Big Easy weirdness, including a party at the Mausoleum and a backpack filled with beer worn to the big game.) As she considers her ongoing life, with ex-husband still in the picture and occasionally in her bed, the author flashes back to their first meeting in college, hints at his infidelities, and describes how she set about divorcing him, after making sure that she would be awarded alimony. Though Conner plays hard for laughs, her story has an underlying sadness: the two can never keep apart for long, and when ex-husband becomes terminally ill, ex-wife is there with affection and support.
A love story that just keeps on going.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-592-40121-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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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