A little wooden sailboat, a raft of memories, and the wide blue Atlantic carry sailor Nichols from England to Maine, almost, in this earnest, reflective chronicle. Nichols quits his soured marriage and takes to the sea, there to feel better about himself, to do something well for a change. His self-appointed challenge is a single-handed sail across the North Atlantic in a shallow-draft, motorless, 27-foot sailboat by the name of Toad, a boat in which he and his wife had recently made the trip in the opposite direction. Nichols is a likable soul- -impecunious, living by his wits, a sailor's sailor who navigates by sextant and instinct, adapting to the dictates of sea and sky. Meteorologically, the weather is with him; emotionally, he finds choppy seas: The bust-up of his marriage plagues him, memories insistently emerge—the more so when he discovers his wife's five-volume diary and flips through its pages. The diaries afford Nichols the opportunity to reminisce about his vagabond years with his wife, sailing in the Virgin Islands and in European waters, always on a shoestring, always bickering. While his inner journey is in no way as tedious as it might have been, it is a relief when Nichols snaps into the present and takes a look around. He has a knack for rendering his landfalls—the Scilly Islands and the Azores—in sharp relief, and a way of making his voyage feel like something out of time: Nothing more than wind drives his boat (remember, this is the North Atlantic, where a motor often comes in real handy) and reckoning is an art, not a digital readout. Though Toad springs a major leak and must be abandoned before reaching its destination, one comes away with the feeling that Nichols has indeed acquitted himself well. (Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection; author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-670-87179-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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