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MICHELANGELO IN RAVENSBRÜCK

ONE WOMAN’S WAR AGAINST THE NAZIS

An unusual memoir from an unusual point of view, one that at times recalls Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind; readable and...

A Polish aristocrat blessed with a considerable sense of noblesse oblige recalls years of resistance to totalitarian rule.

Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, who died in Rome at the age of 104, in 2002, wrote this rich memoir in 1945 and ’46. She sent parts of it to two English publishers, she writes, who rejected it as “too anti-Russian.” A few years later, she sent it to two more publishers, who rejected it as “too anti-German.” In the context of Cold War politics, the publishers were right. In whatever context, Lanckoronska describes, sometimes with considerable indignation, what life was like in Lvov when the Red Army first invaded it under the partition following the Nazi-Soviet pact; a university professor of art history and specialist in the Renaissance, she clearly considered the newcomers barbarians, easily amused by baby rattles and ignorant of how to use a toilet or shower. By her account, the Soviets were also easily misled, childish as they were, yet not without resources and the ability to induce fear: “I was expecting the NKVD every time the doorbell rang,” she writes. With the arrival of the Nazis, she found a new enemy, and so did they. Captured and sentenced to be executed for working with the resistance, she was spared by odd circumstances: One of her interrogators admitted to her that he had participated in the murder of 25 of her fellow professors, and when she brought the matter to another Nazi officer, her sentence was commuted to imprisonment. At Ravensbrück concentration camp, perhaps improbably, she organized her barracks into a miniature university and taught art history to her fellow inmates—and, summoning up the weight of her nobility, also commanded “a degree of orderliness in collective living to ensure that contact with the Germans was kept to the minimum possible.”

An unusual memoir from an unusual point of view, one that at times recalls Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind; readable and thought-provoking.

Pub Date: April 1, 2007

ISBN: 0-306-81537-0

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Da Capo

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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