A wild, unseemly, entertaining elegy that will appeal not just to lummox readers, related in street language that doesn't...
Proletarian novelist Magnuson (The Fire Gospels, 1998, etc.) provides a memoir of his younger days around Menomonee Falls and Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
A child of the ’60s, Magnuson (Creative Writing/Southern Illinois Univ.) writes his autobiographical sketches in the third person and in the vernacular with scant attention to grammatical niceties. The result is graphic, edgy, and (to use a favored locution) pretty much kickass. In his musically precocious youth, the author for a while pursued a grungy life in the music room of an abandoned elementary school. There, he kept a set of drums, drank copious amounts of beer, and contemplated the allure of nubile high-school cheerleaders. Occasionally, although he ran to pudge, young Mike even hooked up with a lubricious teenager. The next section shows our near-troglodyte tubby hero as a counselor in a juvenile group home, working with seriously troubled boys. Thence to life with some fierce feminists, lewd women, and several seriously troubled grownups. Clearly, this is not your TV-sitcom, family-style lummox. Yeah, he’s still big (“about 250 in the winter and 230 in the summer”), but within this boorish, bearish, boozing lout, this sweaty, tavern-haunting factory hand, is a perceptive, serious, and intelligent lummox caught in the guise of an oaf. Deep down, Magnuson admits, he's a pussycat. He has a true appreciation of Bach, Wagner, and Coltrane, Proust, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky. As one of his juvenile charges told him, “you know all kinda shit you never get to tell anybody about.” Now the big guy gets to tell a bit of it, and it makes for kick-back, totally cool reading.
A wild, unseemly, entertaining elegy that will appeal not just to lummox readers, related in street language that doesn't hide the talent.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019372-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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