Second biography of Sylvia Plath this season, this one by the editor of Ariel Ascending (1984), a collection of essays on Plath's life and work. Alexander's is a full-bodied biography, long on facts, short on criticism, but the best so far as a conventional life of the poet. Despite his detail, however, Alexander is much less involved with interpretation than Ronald Hayman is in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (p. 909), a psychocritical investigation focusing on the nature of suicide as shown in the poet's work. Hayman is more exciting, though both writers strain at supposition. Alexander carries Hayman's revisionist view of Plath's husband, poet Ted Hughes, to an even more extreme darkness, with Hughes now showing up as a craggy, violent man obsessed with horoscopes and the occult and in Plath's last year even urging her to suicide, perhaps with posthypnotic suggestion. Implied is that Plath fulfilled an agenda reinforced in her by Hughes, though of course she had an earlier history of suicide attempts. Whatever the truth of this (Hughes has never granted an interview about Plath), it's now more than a quarter century later and Hughes still finds himself pursued by his dead but restless wife in a variety of legal battles about her estate. Alexander (as Hayman did) resorts to paraphrase of Plath's work (Hughes refuses all rights to quote unless he can vet any biography), which tends to de-energize his page, but he has cracked the reserve of many Plath intimates who've not spoken before, especially about Hughes in a strange delirium attempting to strangle Plath and later deserting her outright on a vacation in Ireland when he thought he saw a face move in a painting. Alexander also uncovers a likely abortion that helped save her Fulbright. Lives of Plath are now so familiar that one reads them to see which writer can play Hamlet best. At this point, Hayman—with reservations—cuts the brightest figure, with Plath chewing more scenery than even Alexander can muster. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-81812-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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