Sweet as pie.
The Fab Four become the common ground a father and young son need to light a fire under their relationship in this winning memoir from journalist/novelist Smith (A Good Family, 1996, etc.).
Dad was overworked and underattentive to his seven-year-old: “As Sam got older, I seemed to be mummifying before his eyes . . . my posture defensive, my voice thinner and higher than usual.” One day when Sam was mooning around the house, Peter figured it was time for a new obsession and, not unaware of the inroads popular music was making into the boy’s life, thought the Beatles might make a suitable fixation. And how: from the first taste of Abbey Road, Sam was a goner. And why not? Peter rightly asks. “Nearly a half-century has defanged the group, reducing its innovations and iconoclasms to something warmer and fuzzier,” though the author found upon extensive re-listening that the lads still had their edge of wit and exoticism, still possessed their ability to be smart-assed without being boors. The band’s “boyhood friendships and grownup squabbles, its rivalries, love affairs, submarines, octopuses, silver hammers, newspaper taxis, piggies, raccoons, meter maids” were also pluses. Having grown up with the Beatles, Peter loved them every bit as much as Sam, and it is a small pleasure to watch as the two Smiths discover a vehicle of mutual transit to places they surely never expected to visit just weeks earlier: the politics of Vietnam, death and grief, privacy, Eastern religion, drugs. This occasionally seems overedited, with the author smoothing what had to have been some pregnant moments, but that small fault pales before the joy he conveys at the heaven-sent gift of togetherness he and Sam got from a pop group. You’ve got to love the Beatles, if only for having this kind of impact on the common man and boy, and Smith, whose motives in letting four other men loose in his son’s heart were pure.
Sweet as pie.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-25145-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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