A hagiographic authorized bio of New Jersey's governor, by her personal friend. There can be little pretense of objectivity in a political biography , like this one (the second this year after Sandy McClure's Christy Whitman for the People), which is introduced by the subject: In her rather self-satisfied introduction, Whitman tells about the values of honesty and leadership learned in her wealthy, politically oriented Republican upbringing in rural New Jersey. The author traces Whitman's lineage back to her 17th- century New Jersey forebears, particularly profiling her public- spirited grandfather, John Todd. Then Beard relates more than one is likely to want to know about Whitman's sometimes idyllic, sometimes turbulent childhood on her family's farm; one is even treated to descriptions of home movies featuring Whitman, stories of her foxhunting, and detailed analyses of the dynamics of her parents' relationships. Beard shows the politically charged atmosphere in which Whitman grew up: Her parents, both prominent Republicans, were Eisenhower supporters, although her father was a close friend of Adlai Stevensons. Whitman was early exposed to the excitement of Republican conventions and the trauma of a divided party in 1964, when Goldwater's radical conservatism alienated establishment Republicans like Whitman's father. Although politically aware and active before her 1974 marriage to John Whitman, afterward she devoted herself primarily to her family until her 1982 election to the Somerset County Board of Freeholders. After success there and on the Board of Public Utilities, she ran against and almost beat the highly popular incumbent senator, Bill Bradley, and in 1993, running largely on a platform of tax reform, went on to beat Jim Florio for governor. One would be naive to expect a hard-hitting critique of Whitman or her policies from this adulatory tract. Still, an appealing human portrait emerges of one of the nation's most eminent governors.
Pub Date: July 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-018361-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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