An oddly intimate foray into the life of this most banal specimen of evil.
A journalist’s sure-footed probing into Lee Harvey Oswald’s three years in Russia finds an unsettling time of retrenchment and rage.
Why did Oswald shoot President John F. Kennedy? That, writes journalist Savodnik, remains the key question—not whether the gunman had any accomplices. The author believes Oswald acted alone and was essentially fulfilling an inescapable channeling of estrangement that found expression, after his failed Russian experiment, in sharpshooting and assassination. Largely peripatetic and homeless, never fitting in anywhere, thanks to a dysfunctional home life, absent dad and erratic mother, Oswald eventually gravitated toward the Marines in 1956 in order to escape his mother. The regimen did not suit him, since essentially he was unschooled and undisciplined, and his vague yearnings toward Marxism were naïve and unformed. Still, he managed to force the hand of the Soviet Union when he tried to defect, then attempted suicide to garner sympathy for his cause; incredibly, Russia allowed him to stay and even gave him a job and apartment in Minsk, thus endowing this inconsequential transient with something like heroic status. Even women found the outsider attractive, something he never had experienced before, although most of his co-workers at the Experimental Department in the Minsk Radio Factory kept their distance from the rather too-clean, meek former American. Savodnik gamely looks at the various friendships Oswald made, surely all of them monitored by the KGB, as his resolve to stay began to crumble after a year and some months. He recognized that he would not find a home in Russia as he had hoped—another in a long series of “interloping” failures. Oswald’s dissatisfaction would fatally seize on something, somewhere, soon.
An oddly intimate foray into the life of this most banal specimen of evil.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-02181-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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