Was the great poet a traitorous madman or an quixotic visionary? These previously unpublished letters and documents give more evidence for his sanity than for any lack of it. Beginning in 1940, Pound voluntarily broadcast pro-fascist speeches from Italy, aimed at listeners in the US. Americans, he declaimed, had betrayed their own tradition. Not Roosevelt but Mussolini was the inheritor of the American revolutionary legacy: “The heritage of Jefferson...is HERE, NOW in the peninsula at the beginning of the fascist second decennio, not in Massachusetts or Delaware.” Pound expounded crackpot economic views (anti-Semitic conspiracy theories) while dispensing Confucian wisdom. In May 1945, American authorities arrested and indicted the 60-year-old poet for treason. He was found insane and committed to a federal mental institution. The documentation here seems contradictory. Reports of Pound’s behavior at the time suggest that he was sporadically delusional. For example, when arrested, Pound insisted that he was the right man to negotiate peace with Japan on behalf of the US: “Subject became very indignant,” observed his FBI interrogator to J. Edgar Hoover, when the FBI refused to cable his offer to Truman. However, in letters to his wife, Dorothy, Pound comes across here as mundanely sane, even vigorously, impishly self- possessed. He offers her “nooz items” and asks for hers, in return; reports on gifts received (—Eileen have came again with masses of chocolate & a copy of Verlaine—); provides congratulations (—Glad you are payin income tax, indicates existence of income—;and conducts literary conversation in his signature wry lingo (in a cover note to a military censor about poems forwarded to Dorothy, he declared, “The Cantos contain nothing in the nature of a cypher or intended obscurity—). Spoo (English/Univ. of Tulsa) and Omar Pound, the poet’s son, offer copious and needed annotations to the highly allusive, typically playful letters. As ever, Pound remains a spitfire conundrum.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-510793-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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
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
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