A powerful antidote to Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck.
Entering her 60s with grace and equanimity, Lindbergh (No More Words: A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 2001, etc.) has more important concerns than wrinkles or graying hair.
She writes engagingly about life on a farm in northern Vermont with its clutter, livestock, pets and resident birds, about her writing and her reading and about her family—both the one she grew up in and her present family. Readers may especially savor Lindbergh’s account of a solo stay on Florida’s Captiva Island if they’re familiar with Gift from the Sea, the bestselling meditation her mother wrote while living there, but no previous experience is necessary to enjoy her funny/sad revelations about her beloved former brother-in-law Noel Perrin and his quixotic relations with the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles. The book records two moments of particularly high drama. The first is the author’s diagnosis with a brain tumor that required surgery; excerpts from her journals from July 2006 to May 2007 effectively chart the emotional impact of her illness, also revealing that in the midst of it all she retained her sense of humor. Her delightful poem “My Little Brain Tumor” ends with the cheerful couplet, “It may have to go, though it’s shown little malice, / But if I can keep it, I’m calling it Alice.” The second shocker is the discovery long after Charles Lindbergh’s death that he had three secret families in Europe; during his frequent trips abroad in the 1950s and ’60s, he had conceived seven children. Lindbergh’s initial reaction to her father’s duplicity was anger, but her desire to know these hitherto unknown relatives proved stronger, leading to a moving account of her journey alone to Europe to meet five half-brothers, two half-sisters and their offspring.
A powerful antidote to Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7511-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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