A striking remembrance by an intellectual whose radical, fierce nature is unflappable.
A revolutionary woman and remarkable writer places her long journey within the context of her conflicted past and our own divided present.
Naming one book by Randall (Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity, 2017, etc.)—or even 10 (she has published more than 150)—doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of her oeuvre, let alone summarize her impressive arc as a person. The author has always been busy and prolific, whether as a well-known poet, an active participant in Latin America’s revolutionary culture, a mother, or simply a woman who has experienced multiple awakenings during her 83 years on Earth. This memoir, more generalized than her writings about Cuba or her later years in Albuquerque, not only covers her life, work, and personal evolution, but also provides a sampling of her poetry, photographs, and reflections on the suffering endured by immigrants around the world and the bravery of those honored few who stand up to tyranny. “I want to do more than showcase a singular journey,” Randall writes. “None of us are separate.” The author’s compassion for her fellow humans is always on display, but this is a cinematic story infused with Randall’s intellectual spirit. Born in New York City, Randall found her way around the world, interacting with other writers and artists, raising children, and fighting the good fight in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Though the narrative contains numerous luminaries—Alan Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Arthur Miller, among others—Randall is uninterested in name-dropping. Where the book gets most interesting—and relevant to today—is when the author describes how she was deported in 1984 because “the government claimed that my writing went ‘beyond the good order and happiness of the United States.’ ” She didn’t win her case until 1989, with the assistance of numerous writers, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Kurt Vonnegut, Gray Paley, Carlos Fuentes, and Norman Mailer. “The use of immigration law as a political weapon continues,” writes the author. “Only its victims have changed.”
A striking remembrance by an intellectual whose radical, fierce nature is unflappable.Pub Date: March 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4780-0618-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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