Tempting fare for anyone who’s ever wondered: Who am I and how did I get here?
Essays by a displaced over-40 divorcee with deep Midwestern roots who moves to Manhattan.
Onetime Minnesota Public Radio reporter Lanpher decided as far back as her teens that she would never live in New York because “I didn’t want to pay the price.” The point of reference: a college acquaintance with an intimidating Park Avenue address who liked to boast that “she had her own shrink.” Nonetheless, the day came: Lanpher was offered the job of co-host of Al Franken’s Air America radio show and—on a leap day, Feb. 29th—made the jump, renting out her beloved, cozy house in Saint Paul and moving to an apartment in Greenwich Village. Initially, these essays have a somewhat predictable tone; she is, to all New Yorkers she meets, from cab drivers and deli countermen to cold-staring strangers, the stereotypical out-of-towner, little lost farm girl in the concrete jungle, etc. She doesn’t know enough to not hail a cab going the wrong way on a one-way street; she uses odd words—like “sack” to mean “bag.” As far as she’s concerned, it’s one egregious faux pas after another. But behind her wit and perspective, Lanpher rallies; she’ll learn how to act, how to dress, how to talk like a native and properly scorn the tourists. Forcing its way into the picture, however, is some serious introspection, about her failed marriage, about her childlessness (she wonders, by choice?). Finally, after two years, she finds herself “going home” on the subway in Manhattan.
Tempting fare for anyone who’s ever wondered: Who am I and how did I get here?Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8212-5830-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Springboard Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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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