Wrong’s fiery prose boils the blood and burns infamy into the memory. (2 maps, not seen)
A near-lethal combination of colonialism, Cold War bluster, war and disastrous decision-making has pushed Eritrea, perched atop Ethiopia, to the precipice of history.
Wrong, who has corresponded for the BBC and the Financial Times, returns to Africa with an analysis every bit as devastating as her In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (2001). The scope of her research is astonishing. She visited the country numerous times—in its various manifestations of calm, disarray, chaos, hope and despair; she interviewed key personalities; she read everything directly relevant—and much that’s usefully illustrative. Most important, she thought deeply about how this small country has somehow attracted the notice of powers and superpowers. The title refers to a vicious crack made to an old black woman by a swaggering British officer after an important military victory over the Italians on Eritrean soil: “We didn’t do it for you, nigger.” Indeed. The West has not done much for the country, in Wrong’s analysis, except exploit it in times of self-interest and ignore it otherwise. Wrong begins with some allusions to Lost Horizon and with some lyrical aerial descriptions of Eritrea (a conflation of the Latin for “Red Sea”), then retreats into history to tell us the sad story of this country’s struggles. Before WWII, the Italians came, erecting beautiful buildings and building railways in unimaginably difficult terrain. The British drove them out during WWII, then in turn yielded to the Americans, who saw on an Eritrean high plateau a perfect spot for electronic eavesdropping. Among the nastiest sections in this nasty volume concern the tenure of the Americans, who behaved with an abominable disrespect for the people and the place. “Ugly American” is too pale a term. Then came the Cold War and the senseless, destructive global posturing in Africa by the superpowers, and ruinous, sanguinary wars with Ethiopia.
Wrong’s fiery prose boils the blood and burns infamy into the memory. (2 maps, not seen)Pub Date: June 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-078092-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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