With living survivors seen through the eyes of a contemporary teen, the Holocaust is made present even through the...
A 19-year-old’s firsthand account of the war-crimes trial of a guard at Auschwitz/Birkenau.
In 2015, a Canadian university student witnessed the war-crimes trial of Oskar Groening. Lebowitz, that student and the granddaughter of survivors, has partnered with Kacer (I Am Not a Number, 2016), herself the daughter of survivors, to give her account. Jordana joins a group of Canadian Auschwitz survivors traveling to Germany to testify. Facing 94-year-old Groening, Jordana’s new friends describe the cattle cars and the selections that separated them from family members headed for gas chambers and the crematoria. One witness, a survivor of Josef Mengele’s twin experiments, testifies to the medical experimentation to which she was subjected as a 6-year-old. Groening, tried not for firsthand murder but for enabling the Nazi death machine, is a prime example of the banality of evil. To Jordana’s surprise, she meets many Germans dedicated to correcting the sins of the past, including a tour guide who explains, “my generation…want[s] to take responsibility for our country’s past”—a good lesson to model for readers from other countries, perhaps. Kacer has reconstructed testimony from news articles and interviews, footnoting sources throughout; the telling is straightforward, relying on content for its impact.
With living survivors seen through the eyes of a contemporary teen, the Holocaust is made present even through the uninspiring prose; 72 years after the liberation of the death camps, this immediacy is vital. (epilogue, author’s note by Kacer) (Nonfiction. 11-15)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77260-040-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Second Story Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sandwiched between telling lines from the epic of Gilgamesh (“…the warrior’s daughter, the young man’s bride, / he uses her, no one dares to oppose him”) and the exposure of a migrant worker–trafficking ring in Florida in the mid-1990s, this survey methodically presents both a history of the slave trade and what involuntary servitude was and is like in a broad range of times and climes. Though occasionally guilty of overgeneralizing, the authors weave their narrative around contemporary accounts and documented incidents, supplemented by period images or photos and frequent sidebar essays. Also, though their accounts of slavery in North America and the abolition movement in Britain are more detailed than the other chapters, the practice’s past and present in Africa, Asia and the Pacific—including the modern “recruitment” of child soldiers and conditions in the Chinese laogai (forced labor camps)—do come in for broad overviews. For timeliness, international focus and, particularly, accuracy, this leaves Richard Watkins’ Slavery: Bondage Throughout History (2001) in the dust as a first look at a terrible topic. (timeline, index; notes and sources on an associated website) (Nonfiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-88776-914-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Trailing the stampede of Lincoln-bicentennial studies, this profile of “the clan that might have become America’s royal family but instead became America’s cursed family” offers both a wagonload of fascinating period photos and a case study in domestic tragedy and dysfunction. Leading Lincoln scholar Holzer portrays his presidential paterfamilias as an absentee saint—away on business for much of his four sons’ formative years but ever loving and gentle with his notably histrionic wife and an indulgent pushover who let his lads run hog wild. Conversely, though devastated by 3-year-old Eddie’s death in 1850 and 11-year-old Willie’s in 1862, his relations with Robert (the eldest and the only child to live past his teens, presented here as thoroughly unlikable) were distant at best. If the author sometimes hobbles his narrative with fussy details, he also tucks in such intimate touches as samples of homely verse from both parents and children and finishes off with quick looks at all of the direct descendants. A natural companion for Candace Fleming’s fine The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary (2008). (endnotes, adult-level bibliography) (Biography. 11-14)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59078-303-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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