O’Faolain may be “almost there”—free of turbulence and waste, out of the wild hills and onto calm water—but she may also be...
With the same emotional spadework as in her bestselling Are You Somebody? (1998), O’Faolain turns over the past half decade to try understanding how and why they happened.
O’Faolain moves from her 50s to her 60s during these years, and she feels the narrowing of time and prospects. The narrative is broken into shortish segments, as if the charge of her thoughts quickly saps her energy, so hard do they burn. She is childless and alone at the start, having just ended one long-term relationship, though soon enough she launches a rather greedy affair with an older (and, as she’ll later discover, married) workingman (one senses she is tapping him for character material to use in a novel) and then starts a new love affair in America with a man named John. “One of the great things about this time of life,” she says, is “that good things matter to their fullest extent, because you know exactly how rare they are.” This includes, for her, the rekindling of society with her older siblings, friendships, and an alertness to the pleasures of animals and the natural world. But O’Faolain is one to worry the ambiguities and ambivalences in all that touches her life—shrewdly, artfully, without equivocation. There are obvious things: her alcoholic mother, family pain, the regrets of a spent—blown—youth, drinking too much, the disappearance of love, the place of women in Irish culture, the place of Ireland in her heart. And there are things you wish she’d leave well enough alone, like the minor problems with John (and, oh, how readers will pull for that relationship) that she picks at obsessively.
O’Faolain may be “almost there”—free of turbulence and waste, out of the wild hills and onto calm water—but she may also be constitutionally incapable of such a condition: there’s too much grit in her keen eye to let it rest easy upon the world.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-241-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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