The mystery writer tells, explicitly, honestly, the "history of a delicate time" in her East-Anglian village, from 1938-1941, which- in her personal experiences and those of her village neighbors, represent the whole of England. It has a far bigger panorama than the Kennedy book; it is less personal- more ramifying in detail and in implication. Filled with the homely — anxieties of all, problems of adaptation, local incidents, it should be humanly appealing to all types. Thirty miles from London, absorbed in things as they are, August of 1938 brings the realization of the threat of war, and the village prides itself on its emergency preparations. Then the breather after Munich, and during this period the hardening of the spiritual and mental muscles as they prepare for war. War is declared, and the perpetual surprises, good and bad excitements, the unification of the village as the unexpected numbers, and kinds, of London evacuees arrive. Then the soldiers, the bombings, the defeats that toughened them up without the "lack of an anaesthetizing panoply of battle", Churchill and the finding of a new world, and new values, a pride of race and the beneficial results of anger among a people. Much that is sombre and gay, in a book which is engrossing and moving.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1941
ISBN: 1899262032
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1941
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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