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LAWRENCE

Name: LAWRENCE
Author: Michael Asher
ISBN: 0-87951-712-3

THE UNCROWNED KING OF ARABIA

by Michael Asher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1999

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A biography of T.E. Lawrence, of the linear narrative, pop-psychology school. Asher, himself an explorer and author of numerous books (A Desert Dies, 1987, etc.) braids his rudimentary psychologizing with a chronological approach to Lawrence’s life, from his Oxford youth in the “long bright Indian summer of Old England before the Great War changed the world forever,” to the motorcycle crash that terminated his “masochistic world of reverse values—for him pain was pleasure, servitude freedom, and self-denial orgiastic self-indulgence.” Asher sees most everything in Lawrence’s life filtered through that lens of masochism, the roots of which he finds in Lawrence’s mother’s smothering embrace. Crippled by all the attention, Lawrence assumed a “self-fashioned mantle of oddness”: awkward, remote, homosexual at a time when it could earn you a jail term, thriving where his English mates dwindled—in places such as the Near East, where he first went on archaeological digs. The relations Lawrence struck with the Arabs were characterized by the “paternal benevolence of the autocrat,” according to Asher, and Arabia was a fantasy land wherein he could play out his youthful obsessions with the medieval, slipping into Arab garb, finding “a delight in being that ‘baron in the feudal system’, a European in the East.” Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt is treated as straight rousing military history. It gives Asher, who follows in Lawrence’s footsteps for much of the book, a chance to add some corrections to the Lawrencian legend; for instance, it takes three full days to cross Sinai, not the fabled 49 hours. Then came the postwar, odd-peg years; evidently uncomfortable outside of the military, he tries to reenlist; the hero goes looking for the oblivion of the enlisted man, “towards degradation, poverty, self-denial and enslavement,” that reverse exhibitionism learned at his mother’s knee. “Lawrence was perhaps the first international megastar of the century,” Asher suggests, and this rather narrow biography pays due homage. (49 b&w photos)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-87951-712-3

Page Count: 418

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BORN SURVIVORS

THREE YOUNG MOTHERS AND THEIR EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF COURAGE, DEFIANCE, AND HOPE

by Wendy Holden ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2015

An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NAME OF GUCCI
by Patricia Gucci with Wendy Holden

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BEAT OF MY OWN DRUM
by Sheila Escovedo with Wendy Holden

- BOOK REVIEW
HAATCHI & LITTLE B
by Wendy Holden

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.