A riveting story that blends World War II history and tales of growing up.
Lambert artfully converts his coming-of-age journals into a thrilling survivor’s story.
In his third-person autobiographical account, Lambert and his twin brother, Ron, were raised in World War II–era Germany, the sons of a British diplomat and an Austrian mother. They led a normal, happy life until Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated their power. Initially, the twins were intrigued by the idea of joining the Hitler Youth: “Wouldn’t mind getting into that mob,” Ron said. “Did you see the knives they all had on their belts?” Ken responded. All that changed when their private school became militarized and the Lambert twins were forcibly enlisted into the Young Folks, the youngest group involved in Hitler’s plan to create perfect Aryan youth. And they had no idea what happened to their parents. The twins became disillusioned with Nazi brutality, particularly when it came to the persecution of Jews. After seeing a family of Jews forcibly removed from their home, the author told his brother, “They are Jews…poor buggers. What have they done to be treated like this?” The Lamberts attempted to hide within the Nazi infrastructure at their school, but eventually they, along with their best friend, Hans, and their platoon leader, Dieter, decided to escape. “We have to run now,” Lambert said, “before the army call-up gets us.” The quartet lived on the run for the rest of the seemingly endless war, first using their outdoor skills to live in a secluded rural valley, then becoming proficient black marketeers in their hometown of Munich, all while largely eluding the SS and the Gestapo. Lambert skillfully explores the conditions that allowed Hitler to rise to power as well as what it was like to be caught inside the fanaticism. The memoir is stuffed—almost overstuffed—with details of life during wartime; tighter editing would help shorten or eliminate unnecessary anecdotes that sap some of the book’s momentum. Lambert, his brother, and their friends are nevertheless sympathetically drawn characters caught in chaos beyond their control, and the lengthy narrative will have readers rooting for them to survive these most trying of circumstances.
A riveting story that blends World War II history and tales of growing up.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5029-5519-7
Page Count: 420
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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