Only time will tell if this is the definitive Bowie bio, but for now it should satisfy hardcore Ziggy freaks and most casual...
A breezy, well-lit portrait of the ever-enigmatic rocker.
Born David Jones in 1947, David Bowie became one of the most shape-shifting artists in the history of rock ’n’ roll. From psychedelic folkie, to dramatic glamster, to blue-eyed soul crooner, to electronic new waver, to hard-rocking alterna-dude, to elder hipster statesman, Bowie is a restless—some would say contradictory—soul. A charismatic, arresting presence on both the music and social scene, the lanky Brit has always spent considerable amounts of time in the public eye. However, few know what he’s really about. Fortunately for Bowie’s multitudinous minions, veteran pop-culture scribe Spitz delivers the goods, despite his subject’s lack of participation in the making of this filmic book. The author (Nobody Likes You: Inside the Life, Turbulent Times, and Music of Green Day, 2006, etc.) takes great care in his dissection of the details of Bowie’s long, eventful career, from the highs—e.g., the success of his remarkably entertaining alter ego Ziggy Stardust—to the lows, most notably a lengthy coke bender that almost ended it all. Unauthorized biographies are often frustratingly shallow for serious fans of the book’s subject—especially when lacking new material, an original spin or a legitimate sense of enthusiasm—but Spitz’s encyclopedic knowledge and obvious appreciation for Bowie’s work separate this book from countless cookie-cutter rock stories.
Only time will tell if this is the definitive Bowie bio, but for now it should satisfy hardcore Ziggy freaks and most casual fans.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-39396-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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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