A consistently understated, mostly engrossing read.
A British novelist and playwright’s memoir about growing up with a near-deaf, roofing-salesman father.
Although it takes a few chapters for the narrative to gain its footing, this finely detailed remembrance displays subtle wit and powers of perception that magnify every nook and cranny of ordinary life into something extraordinary. Frayn (Travels with a Typewriter: A Reporter at Large, 2009, etc.) begins with his hearing-impaired father’s marriage in the late 1930s. By the time children materialize, the Frayn family has moved from gritty North London to the leafier outland of Ewell, 12 miles outside the city. Frayn’s father pursued the same middle-class suburban dreams of many families at the time, when a respectable suburban home could be purchased for less than £1,000. As the book gains steam, it’s tough to judge whether the author has photographic mental recall, or if his attentiveness to detail can be attributed to a particularly imaginative sense of historical embellishment. Whatever the case, Frayn evokes the sights, sounds and smells of his boyhood as if it had all taken place yesterday. The author’s prose particularly shines when he conjures the dread of V-2 bombings over London during the Blitz. Frayn’s dry, Orwellian sense of humor doesn’t creep into the narrative until he describes the specific ways in which he failed to live up to his father’s hopes for an athletically inclined child—the young author was physically awkward and “slow witted” and didn’t embrace conventional sport until much later in life. As the memoir progresses into Frayn’s adolescent years, the emphasis subtly shifts to his own exploits as a junior intellectual and culture snob. His father’s “fortune,” as one might expect, turns out to be much more important than the kind of inheritance found in a retirement account.
A consistently understated, mostly engrossing read.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9377-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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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