Peter Mayle meets Foreign Affairs in this double-edged tale of reconstruction in post-Communist Poland. Like many other Poles, young Sikorski (Dust of the Saints: A Journey Through War-Torn Afghanistan, 1990) found himself abroad (in England) when martial law was declared in Poland in 1981. But his life in exile, unlike most, was unusually charmed. By the time he returned to Poland in his late 20s, he was an Oxford-educated author and journalist with experience in Africa and Afghanistan. Active in the Solidarity-led government, he also took on the considerable task of reclaiming and restoring his family's old manor house, known as a dworek. ``A dworek is not just a nice house to live in, but a calling,'' writes Sikorski with characteristic intensity and passion. Not only was there the challenge and pleasure of restoring the ruined shell of a once-beautiful building, but there was the history of the environs (and, by extension, of Poland itself) to explore through the process. Sikorski quite clearly means for the restoration to serve as a metaphor for post-Communist Poland's active and often confusing search for a new identity and purpose. He interweaves his descriptions of the reconstruction of the house with his family's history and the turbulent history of modern Poland. Sikorski brings an appealingly dry wit to his observations about post-Communist politics but skimps on the more tangible aspects of reconstructing the dworek (i.e., finances). The house is located in Pomerania, a region that has shifted between German and Polish control, and relations between Poles and Germans loom large in these stories. But Sikorski's presentation of the German-Polish problem manages to diminish or neglect the Jewish aspect of Poland's past. His otherwise moving account of Polish suffering under the Nazis would have been better balanced if placed within the larger picture of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Full Circle is an engagingly written and enlightening look at contemporary Poland and its zeitgeist. (10 b&w photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81102-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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