Actress Woronov (Wake for the Angels, 1994, not reviewed), best known today for her work with Paul Bartel and Roger Corman, recalls her early career as a film personality and hanger-on with Andy Warhol. Woronov grew up in a troubled family, her beautiful mother hooked on pills, her stepfather a likeable but cold doctor. As a child, she was prone to uncontrollable fits of rage and violence and apparently more than once came within an eyelash of being expelled from school. By the time she was an art major at Cornell, she was ripe for a radical change, and stumbling into the Warhol circle was at best a fortuitous accident. Once she met up with them, Woronov dropped out of college, running away to join the Warhol circus. The rest of the story is an unending parade of drugs, drugs, drugs, interlarded with tales of internecine warfare among the various groupies, wannabes, and central figures surrounding Warhol. ``Talent, of course, meant nothing to this crowd,'' she writes at one point. ``I was the only one who memorized my lines and no one even noticed.'' From the frantic and tedious goings-on, it's clear how such an achievement might have gone unremarked. Readers looking for some insight into the fascination that Warhol exerted on the underground scene of the '60s will come away from this slender volume unenlightened. What they will have received instead is a sort of drug-induced dime- store surrealism, a book for people who think that rock record liner notes are the pinnacle of literary achievement. And it takes itself so damned seriously. Dull, distasteful, depressing, and without the saving graces of humor and wry self-knowledge that have made Woronov such a delightful performer for Bartel. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-885203-21-7
Page Count: 252
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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