A simultaneously interesting and depressing story of arrested development, as sometimes occurs with those who write of...
With his broad knowledge of J.M. Barrie (1860-1937) and his contemporaries, Dudgeon (Maeve Binchy: The Biography, 2014, etc.) tells the disturbing story of his odd relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family.
The author points out that the story of Peter Pan features a spiritual dimension of childhood that transcends adulthood. Barrie adored the children of Sylvia and Art Llewelyn Davies, and the games he played with them in Kensington Gardens helped in the creation of Peter Pan. It was a process of improvisation and underwent constant revision over the years. Barrie readily admitted that he adored Michael in the strange sort of Edwardian love. The author explains it as best he can, noting the strong bond of boys away at public school. Michael unknowingly ruled Barrie. Stories were presented to Michael, who would finish them or reject them. Sylvia was the daughter of George du Maurier, author of Peter Ibbetson, a book that greatly influenced Barrie. Du Maurier was also a strong supporter of the concept of psychic ability, and Sylvia inherited his “more than earthly” aura. Barrie shared his paranormal fascination, and Sylvia encouraged Barrie’s obsession with her children, almost as if he were a second nanny, taking them off her hands. Her husband, mother, and especially her son, Jack, disliked his control. Jack was recommended by Barrie to Osborne Naval College to get him out of the way. After the death of Sylvia, Barrie took over the boys’ upbringing. It was a life of privilege and fishing excursions to Scotland, where Michael learned to cast off Barrie’s yoke. Insisting that there was no homosexual side to Barrie’s love, Dudgeon explores the man and his character, his obsession with death and the afterlife, the cruel side to his writings, and the strange illusions he created around himself.
A simultaneously interesting and depressing story of arrested development, as sometimes occurs with those who write of children’s heroes.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08779-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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