An emotional and thought-provoking mix of poetic prose, memories, and beliefs on death, loss, and grief.
A Nova Scotia–based writer and photographer offers ruminations about grief by a mother who lost a son.
When Inglis’ (If I Were a Zombie, 2016, etc.) twin boys were born prematurely, one lived and one died after several weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. The author intertwines reflective meditations and memories of her experience with her tenets on grief that she has accrued from the years living with her ever present pain and sense of loss. “I’ve been falling for years,” she writes, “scrambling up again, sorting out in fits and spurts, freshly sorted reasonings collapsing in on themselves to make space for new wrack. I worry any mandate of mine is fresh paint on rotten wood.” In a text geared primarily toward those who have struggled with the unthinkable loss of a child, Inglis shares how she coped, joining marches and giving speeches, getting angry at well-meaning friends, and dealing with the depression that afflicted her. Through her intense grief, she learned to understand what it means to be alive, and she effectively shares her insights with readers: “As the only animals who know we will die, how should we live? This is the sweet and futile agony. It’s where every inner monologue comes from….Somehow, despite knowing loss will happen to us—and that our own ashes will someday be inside an urn on the lap of somebody who loved us—it’s still incomprehensible.” At times, Inglis gives her misery free rein, forcing readers to suffer alongside her as she relives the all-too-brief weeks she had with her son. In other passages, her wisdom rings out strong and clear and will strike a chord with anyone who has lost a loved one.
An emotional and thought-provoking mix of poetic prose, memories, and beliefs on death, loss, and grief.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61180-550-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Shambhala
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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