A moving memoir about a German family’s wartime experience.
In this debut, a survivor recollects his childhood in Germany during World War II.
Tradowsky was only 3 years old in 1938 when Germany annexed the Sudetenland and 9 when Allied forces defeated the Nazis once and for all. In this remarkable, if slightly overlong, memoir, the author chronicles these first years of his life, concluding with the American occupation of Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war. Tradowsky’s parents, a theater director and a homemaker, opposed the Nazis but were not intensely political, and his early childhood seems to have been largely untouched by the war. With great lucidity and emotional acuity, he recounts bike trips to the Black Forest, the birth of his younger sister, his family’s move from Berlin to Strasburg and his changing relationship with his parents. Both Walter and Annemarie Tradowsky come across as real, complex characters, and the author treats them lovingly but fairly; although they were clearly dedicated parents, neither managed to escape inevitable child-rearing failures. Young Michael’s idolization of his father ends, for instance, when Walter punishes him for lying by refusing to speak to him for days—even after Michael has apologized. “Ever after, our relationship was tarnished with a bit of reserve, a tiny remnant of distrust,” Tradowsky writes. Although these peacetime chapters are engaging, the book inevitably picks up in its second half, when the war finally reaches the Tradowsky family, ultimately displacing them and forcing them to live as refugees. This memoir is most notable for its detailed depiction of an average German family’s life during wartime; it can be easy to forget that many German citizens had no affiliation with the Nazis. The author’s parents were not self-sacrificing heroes of the resistance, but their struggle to preserve some kind of normal life for their children as a war consumed their entire nation is admirable.
A moving memoir about a German family’s wartime experience.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475954265
Page Count: 450
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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