Never preachy or self-pitying, just an honest story well written and well told.
A touching memoir of a truly miserable childhood.
That Bouman could write of his life of abuse in Michigan and make it sound like fun is the mark of a man who has completely come to terms with the higher plan for his life. It may have taken him more than two decades to discover it, but when he did, he embraced it and became a man with a mission. His writing is matter-of-fact and in no way an attempt to purge the pain of living with a father who treated him like an imbecile incapable of anything and regularly beat him and his brother. Somehow, the author manages to describe a life that, between beatings, would seem attractive to most boys. When Bouman was young, his father put an airplane engine in a VW to make a carplane, and he opened up a shooting range on their 11-acre land and purchased a massive boat. He also bought a tank, which just about everyone thought was the coolest thing ever. He actually let the boys drive the tank, and it proved useful for putting out fires and demolishing unwanted buildings. Bouman seems to be trying to paint a more pleasant picture of his childhood, but the facts of the beatings and the demolition of any character he might have developed seep through. Later on, substance abuse threatened to end his military career, until someone invited him to church. Who knows why such things appear just as a soul is sinking into the abyss? Religion changed him, and he eventually found his wife and opened an orphanage in Cambodia in the early 1990s, where he finally discovered the profit of his upbringing. This immensely inspiring story shows how Bouman tore success from defeat.
Never preachy or self-pitying, just an honest story well written and well told.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4143-9027-7
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
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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