Show biz biographer Gottfried (All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, 1990, etc.) once again condescends to his subject. As usual, Gottfried has done a solid job of researching and crisply retelling the life story of Danny Kaye, born David Kaminski in 1913 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. He capably situates Kaye, who began his career in the Catskills, at ``a historic moment [when] the low clowns of burlesque and the elegant monologuists of vaudeville...were being replaced by the cooler, more remote entertainers of radio and the movies.'' Kaye himself, though he exuded warmth onstage, was, in Gottfried's depiction, emotionally distant in his personal life, and he gained his greatest fame as a carefully nonethnic, childlike performer attuned to the mores of suburban, family-oriented postwar America—though he himself was thoroughly urbane. His stage successes in the early 1940s and such movie vehicles as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and Hans Christian Andersen (1952) never really captured Kaye's unique combination of gifts; Gottfried rightly points to the sophisticated mÇlange of comic songs, soft-shoe dancing, and audience-pleasing patter in his nightclub act, which triumphed at the London Palladium in 1948, as more expressive of his abilities. Not that Gottfried appears to think much of those abilities; he quotes extensively from negative assessments of Kaye's work and is similarly free with bitchy comments from people who knew the entertainer, regaling us endlessly with stories of Kaye's ego, cruelty, and strained marriage with writer Sylvia Fine, depicted as a union of professional convenience. He does take time to convincingly refute Donald Spoto's much-ballyhooed claim that Kaye and Laurence Olivier were lovers, but other than that, no gossip is too mean-spirited to repeat. The author seems almost to relish Kaye's sad professional and personal decline before his death in 1987. Comprehensive—except for any spark of human sympathy.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-86494-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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