Self-indulgent ramblings that reveal more about the author than about her putative subject. Relentless pop-psych memoirist Chernin (A Different Kind of Listening, 1995, etc.) opens, fittingly enough, with a blow-by-blow account of her state of mind on Feb. 24, 1991, when she attended a concert at Berkeley given by a then-unknown 25-year-old Italian mezzo soprano. Chernin's devotees may be impressed with her vapid meandering (``I have taught myself not to expect too much from life, except where music is concerned''); those who picked up the book under the impression it was about Bartoli may feel some impatience. Breathless descriptions of Chernin's rapturous response to that and subsequent performances add nothing to our understanding of the singer best known for championing the neglected 18th-century repertoire and for zesty comic turns in Mozart and Rossini operas. An unintentionally hilarious chapter about a 1993 Chernin/Bartoli interview shows the artist politely answering questions on the order of ``Do you have a sense of carrying a sacred message?,'' while the author favors us with such portentous comments as ``With these words Cecilia Bartoli has taken on a strangely ageless quality.'' Coauthor Stendhal, identified only as Chernin's ``usual companion,'' provides some relief with a 70-page performance guide free from the bloated adjectives and trite theorizing of the previous 138 pages; her detailed, often shrewd analyses concentrate on what Bartoli actually did rather than her own reactions to it. But the book's overall tone is Chernin's. Anyone who believes with her that divas are intermediaries between the gods and the rest of us, or that opera inducts us into ``the secret emotional life of women'' (never mind that most of it was written by men) had better hope that these ideas find a more persuasive proponent next time around.
Pub Date: March 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-018644-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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