An invaluable document of history as well as a riveting literary narrative, spirited out of France by Saint-Exupéry yet...
An extraordinary account of a French couple’s fleeing of Paris just in front of the Germans in June 1940, followed by a despairing stint among some eagerly appeasing villagers.
A kind of magical thinking takes place in the mind of this first-person narrator as he and his wife were mired in a German-occupied village on their way south by car from Paris. A novelist and journalist who experienced the trench warfare in World War I, Werth (1878-1955) addresses this account to his best friend, pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as a way of establishing facts without elaboration. These facts indeed grow increasingly nonsensical. Moving in a daze of denial, the narrator admits that he was “in no hurry to leave” Paris, yet on the advice of “A,” he decided to put “sixty kilometers between the Germans and us.” The road south was clogged, as cars broke down, people drove wagons pulled by horses, and pedestrians were able to walk faster than the caravan—many of the limping, downtrodden pedestrians were the routed French soldiers. News was fluid, but gossip about the Germans’ actual location was rampant, and angry cries of “France is betrayed!” were common—though the narrator wanted to ask: by whom? Hoping to reach and cross the Loire but thwarted by Germans swarming over the countryside, the narrator and his wife (as well as their nanny, who disappears at some point in the narrative) moved from a hospitable farming family in Chapelon to shelter with a horrifying pair of German-speaking farm wives in Les Douciers, where the narrator watched in a “hallucinatory” moment as one offered the invading Germans champagne. Returned to Chapelon, Werth chronicles strange, intimate encounters between the French and Germans in moving, vivid detail.
An invaluable document of history as well as a riveting literary narrative, spirited out of France by Saint-Exupéry yet somehow "lost."Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-425-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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