Truthful, dignified, and pragmatic writing.
A woman chronicles a painful divorce in this debut memoir.
Taylor remembers that she was driving on the interstate with her then-husband, Jim, when he suddenly announced, “I’m done with our marriage.” The couple had been facing tough challenges: Jim’s work had forced them to maintain a long-distance relationship for sustained periods, and his brother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. However, there were no clear indications that Jim would request a divorce. Indeed, the shock was so great that the author says that she felt that “all the oxygen seemed to escape from the vehicle.” When they first got married, she remembers, they used to wake each morning with smiles on their faces; they’d both been divorced before, so they were committed to making their marriage work. After settling together in Summerville, South Carolina, a chain of events, including leaving her job as a teacher, led to Taylor’s feeling isolated. She writes that Jim told her that she sometimes said “hurtful” things, particularly after overindulging in wine, but she felt that her actions didn’t warrant his description of her as “selfish” and “mean.” This memoir confronts the painful, debilitating nature of divorce and offers guidance on how to survive “unexpectedly starting over” at 60. The act of putting her story on paper appears to have been a major source of catharsis for the author; she says that she’d always wanted to be a writer and that her grief helped her to complete this book. Her prose is elegantly descriptive and effortlessly precise throughout, and she speaks tenderly and directly to her readers: “You, too, have the ability to regain your confidence, abandon your hopelessness, and realize that you are not a woman to be tossed aside and forgotten.” Taylor carefully explores her own rebuilding process, including time that she spent in therapy and the crucial support that she received from her friends. Her book may act as a lifeline for other women going through similar experiences, as it offers hope for newfound happiness.
Truthful, dignified, and pragmatic writing.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-454-7
Page Count: 152
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
