An entertaining retelling of a forgotten story, written for political junkies who enjoy the naughty and the nice.
A journalist and the CEO of an education advisory company unite to tell the story of the famous first cousins who occupied very different positions on the continuum of political belief.
Former Newsweek and Budget Travel deputy editor Peyser and School Choice International CEO Dwyer have quite a story to tell, one that drips with the intrigue of political power and the venom of personal jealousy, copious tears, regret, loss and betrayal. The more famous of the Roosevelt cousins (now and then) is, if course, Eleanor (1884-1962), who married FDR, tolerated his various romantic liaisons, helped with the treatment of his polio and outlived him to become a liberal icon. Alice (1884-1980), a daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, was friendly and affectionate with Eleanor early on, but they both flirted with Franklin, and the more attractive Alice did not take the loss lightly. Though she married Nick Longworth, Alice remained as sexually frisky, and otherwise mischievous, as a libidinous teen, engaging in multiple affairs over the years. Alice also was “ever the guttersnipe,” write the authors, who seem sometimes uncertain of their ultimate opinion of her: Was she a jerk? An opportunist? A happy hedonist? When FDR began his rise, Alice was not aboard. She planted herself firmly on the other side, as a moderately popular newspaper columnist and a highly quotable critic. (Readers might imagine an Ann Coulter with more self-restraint.) The authors’ admiration for Eleanor is patent, and they fully chronicle her human rights advocacy, her tireless travel to experience the lives of others, her prodding of FDR to do something about civil rights and her own popularity (far beyond Alice’s) as a newspaper columnist. The authors, understandably, have occasional trouble shoving aside the looming men to let us see the women.
An entertaining retelling of a forgotten story, written for political junkies who enjoy the naughty and the nice.Pub Date: March 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53601-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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