by Julian Padowicz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2006
A nice record for the author’s grandchildren, but not useful for anyone else.
Plodding recollections of a year in wartime Poland.
As a young boy in Warsaw, the author rarely saw his glamorous mother Barbara, who left his care to a governess, Kiki. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Kiki returned to her family, and Barbara decided to take her son to the Ukraine, joining forces with several other relatives to flee Warsaw. She emerges as the real hero of this tale. Food was scarce in Soviet-occupied Ukraine, medicine scarcer still, but Barbara did whatever she had to—from telling lies to flirting with Soviet officers—to get provisions for her family. Finally, determined that her son would not grow up in the Soviet system, Barbara escaped with Julian to Hungary. The basic plotline is engaging enough, but Padowicz’s prose is flat and at times awkward (“The way they walked together didn’t look as though anyone was mad at anyone else anymore”). He relies too much on dialogue, and most of the characters sound alike. He fails to delve into his feelings about leaving Warsaw and losing Kiki, an omission that robs his account of emotional heft. That he provides almost no sensory details similarly distances readers from his experiences. The penultimate scene, for example, in which Padowicz and his mother crawl in the cold and through the snow of the Carpathian Mountains, cries out for descriptors. Padowicz also neglects his story’s potentially powerful religious subtext: Julian and Barbara were Jewish, but the Catholic prayers he learned from Kiki helped them go unnoticed in the Ukraine; that wincing irony is intriguing, but the author never fleshes it out.
A nice record for the author’s grandchildren, but not useful for anyone else.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-89733-544-9
Page Count: 447
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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