Never preachy or self-righteous, Beaver praises the exhilaration of independence while keeping faith always within reach.
A backsliding evangelical Christian shares stories of a warped youth spent shedding religion for adolescent shenanigans in the 1980s.
In his affable, if somewhat tepid, debut memoir, Beaver writes about how his coming-of-age years were pre-empted by church services warning him of eternal damnation unless he devoted his life to Christian salvation. The son of a war veteran and blue-collar Southern Baptist deacon, Beaver’s yearnings for mischief began to stir in his early teens while on an evangelical camping trip. At the weeklong gathering hosted by a pastor busy channeling the power of God, the newly baptized author busied himself with the glorious distraction of a nearby pretty girl “tucked inside a terrycloth towel.” Beaver’s carnal interests were further stoked by a neighborhood friend brandishing a stack of dirty magazines and a new telescope to spy on the frequently topless woman across the street. Whether concerning his adventures in the middle school band or obsessing over scantily clad TV vixen Daisy Duke, Beaver’s anecdotes are consistently breezy and lighthearted, adding warm humor to an already ebullient sketch of his restless adolescence. The memoir’s period detail is also notable, as it describes Georgia’s rampant racial unrest and the trial of unrepentant serial killer Wayne Williams. At 16, Beaver was driving a beat-up Camaro with reckless abandon, and his primary mission was to achieve “vehicular amour” with a girl in the back seat. An ear piercing, prom night, and the loss of his virginity all promised a future of free-spirited years ahead—far away from life stuck in a stifling suburban subdivision. It also signaled a distinct divorce between the author and his staunch evangelical roots. In a contemporary, poignant closing chapter, Beaver joyously welcomes the birth of his daughter just a month after the passing of his father.
Never preachy or self-righteous, Beaver praises the exhilaration of independence while keeping faith always within reach.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-938235-19-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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