A sweet, contained view of Louis B. Mayer’s favorite actress and Hollywood’s icon of WWII fortitude. Garson had no children (“no life has everything,” she commented, characteristically). Thus she eliminated the chance for nasty child tell-alls and left the mantle of remembrance to respectful outsiders. Troyan, a photo coordinator for Warner Bros. International Television Distribution, fits the bill, granting the warmth and distance due a subject who held afternoon teas on the set but also read the classics between takes. There’s little ancient family history unearthed, except for observations on her seafaring ancestors, her erudite father (who died young), and her sickly early youth. After a triumph on the London stage, Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson was brought to Hollywood in 1937 by Louis B. Mayer as another of his foreign discoveries. For months she languished, until her tiny role as wife in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) made her a star. Soon thereafter followed Mrs. Miniver (1942). If this book does nothing else, it re-creates the sadly exquisite timing and great power of Miniver to galvanize US prowar sympathies and provide Garson with a lifelong symbol, the rose. By the time her film career ended in 1967, she had won seven Oscar nominations (and one win, for Miniver); had begun her extensive philanthropic efforts; and was deep in a happy third marriage to businessman Buddy Fogelson. Until her death in 1996, she retained her persona among fans as Queen of MGM, the fine lady with the orange hair. Public opinion changed little even after her 1940s divorce from Miniver co-star Richard Ney (who had played her son!). Expect no new revelations on film history or shocking discoveries about Garson’s personal life; instead, veneration for a seemly star. (48 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8131-2094-2
Page Count: 506
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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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