Mostly standard writing advice, minus the bullet points, plus the gleanings from a lifetime of reading and thought.
A veteran editor, teacher, and author assembles some advice for aspiring writers of fiction.
Cohen (Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star that Gives Us Life, 2010, etc.) tells us that his new volume began “as an outflow of my university teaching,” and in some ways, the lecturer’s tone remains. For each of his points, the author mines his own vast reading, with names like Tolstoy, Twain, Updike, Dickens, Eliot, and other notables appearing continually, and he has a fondness for occasionally declaring what is the best: James Wood is the best book critic today (difficult to argue with that); F.L. Lucas’ Style is the best book about rhythm and writing. Cohen’s myriads of examples are lush and instructive though sometimes quite elementary. He takes a little time, for example, to explain what iambic pentameter is; it’s hard to imagine that the readers of this book would not know such a thing. Organized topically—beginnings, point of view, dialogue, rhythm, sex, endings—the book generally surveys the literary history of the topic, offers some prescriptions and proscriptions, and concludes with some advice for the novice—e.g., “simple clear prose is not the only way to write, but it is the best.” Along the way, Cohen delivers a few sharp jabs at some writers—Michael Holroyd’s writing, he writes, has grown “slipshod”—but for the most part, he is a generous tour guide through his literary world and generally favors positive over negative examples—though there are plenty of the latter. Perhaps most engaging are Cohen’s occasional anecdotes about his own experiences as a writer and editor and—in one extensive case—literary friend: he tells a fine story about how Richard Holmes developed the idea for his Footsteps (1985).
Mostly standard writing advice, minus the bullet points, plus the gleanings from a lifetime of reading and thought.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9830-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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