by Paul M. and Stephanie Duke Duke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 6, 2006
A pleasant study in the growth of young love across the Atlantic.
Sweet teen love letters from the 1940s.
This delightful little epistolary collection opens a window on the contrasting worlds of post-WWII London and Akron as seen through the eyes of 16-year-old Brit Stephanie Grant and her Ohioan pen pal Paul Duke, one year her senior. The year-and-a-half correspondence between the two developed after they answered notices for “pen friends” in their local newspapers. What began as a kind of vicarious travel adventure soon blossomed into a great friendship, resulting in Paul’s visit to London some six months later in April of 1949. (The couple married in 1950 and are still together.) Both parties’ letters abound with interesting tidbits illustrating the differing conditions in the comparably posh Akron, “ ‘Rubber Capital of the World,’ ” where the snow never stays white for long, versus post-war London, where food rations and muted living were still the norm. Other points of note in these strikingly mature letters arise from entertaining linguistic differences between American English and British English. Some of the more amusing observations come from Stephanie, who writes, “ ‘What a funny phrase to use, ‘bum steer.’ The first word has an entirely different meaning over here, I’m sure.’ ” As Paul plans his trip, he questions his pronunciation of “Thames,” and Stephanie opens her next letter with typical British urgency: “My goodness! I have never been so amazed as when I read your pronunciation of Thames! You must never pronounce it as it is spelt! It is Temms. As for other places, Leicester is Lester, Gloucester is Gloster, Worcester is Wooster, and Worcestershire is Woostersheer.”
A pleasant study in the growth of young love across the Atlantic.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-39505-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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