A world-class newsman's absorbing, anecdotal account of his experiences as a high-profile foreign correspondent. While Arnett has covered events in a host of remote venues, here he focuses on his lengthy stint with the AP in Southeast Asia's combat zones, as well as on a briefer but vastly more visible sojourn as CNN's man in Baghdad at the height of Desert Storm. The New Zealand-born author, 59, was first assigned to Vietnam in mid-1962. Although his front-line reportage on America's involvement there often infuriated the US military and their Washington masters, he earned himself a Pulitzer—and the respect of his professional peers (Malcolm Browne, Horst Faas, David Halberstam, et al.). Posted to the AP's Manhattan headquarters in 1970, Arnett returned to Vietnam frequently, filing dispatches with a variety of datelines—Hanoi, Hue, and even Saigon weeks after its fall to the Communists. Casting his lot in 1981 with the fledgling CNN, Arnett learned the TV trade on the job, in such hot spots as Afghanistan, Beirut, El Salvador, Moscow, and Panama. Heading once again toward the sound of the guns, the author (who became an American citizen following his tour in the Soviet Union) slipped into Iraq days before the US-led coalition unleashed a savage aerial assault on its capital city. Although his under-fire broadcasts from the al-Rashid Hotel, a lengthy interview with Saddam Hussein, and follow-up reports on civilian casualties gained him further enemies in official circles, Arnett's on-air exposure made him a star with the viewing public. Here, in offering his side of this story (and others), he provides compelling reminders that journalism is indeed a calling that—for all its sins of omission and commission—does free people a service whose value is often beyond reckoning. An engrossing memoir—complete with perceptive commentary on colleagues and contemporary notables—from one of the fourth estate's authentic paradigms. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs— not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-75586-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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