A well-designed, poignant story of the Holocaust told by two survivors.
Lowy recounts the unlikely reunion of two childhood survivors of the Holocaust in this nonfiction book.
After a long career as a producer and creative director working closely with Van Morrison, Harry Connick, Jr., and Malcolm Gladwell, among others, the author turned to a more personal project in 2001 when he made the documentary Leo’s Journey: The Story of the Mengele Twins. Narrated by Christopher Plummer, the documentary was aired worldwide and featured the story of Lowy’s father Leopold and aunt Miriam, who survived horrific experiments at the hands of Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camp during World War II. While the story of Leopold and the making of Leo’s Journeycertainly receive ample coverage in the work (“Imagine growing up and not realizing over fifty members of your family were murdered,” the author reflects), the heart of this book’s narrative is the chance reunion between Leopold and another childhood victim of Mengele. Watching Leo’s Journey from his home in Tel Aviv, Kalman Bar-On instantly recognized the face of Leopold, who had “saved [him] from beatings and looked out for [him]” during a six-month period in 1944 before the liberation of Birkenau. Only knowing Leopold by his nickname “Lipa,” Kalman had faced a series of dead ends throughout his 56-year search for the fellow “Mengele Twin” with whom he had bonded as a child.
Detailing the reunion between Leopold and Kalman, this book also serves as a unique oral history as both men recount their childhoods, experiences in Birkenau, and their subsequent lives after the war. (The text also contains primary sources including reproductions of personal correspondence.) These reminiscences provide a harrowing first-hand account of the grotesque nature of Mengele’s brutality and the callous inhumanity of the Holocaust broadly. As the author quickly discovered following his first meeting with Kalman in Israel, conversing with his father’s childhood ally was “like stepping into history itself.” The recollections of Leopold and Kalman are richly annotated by Lowy with footnotes that provide historical context, descriptions of Yiddish terminology, and commentary on Jewish traditions and culture. A foreword by Michael Berenbaum, Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, adds to the book’s scholarly panache. As impressive as Lowy’s research is, this is ultimately a deeply personal family history crafted by a son seeking to preserve his father’s legacy. Unsurprisingly, given the author’s extensive experience in the entertainment industry, the book’s engaging story is presented in a visually impressive layout featuring a wealth of maps, charts, photographs, and other visual elements. Family trees and a detailed glossary are characteristic of Lowy’s accessible approach as he explores broad questions and themes related to the Holocaust through the lenses of two individuals who both died prior to the book’s publication. While the story is ultimately uplifting (“He is my hero,” Kalman says of Leopold; “I’ve been looking for Leo all my life”), Lowy does not shy away from the brutal history of the Holocaust, including the ways in which Mengele’s psychological torture impacted survivors for more than a half-century after the war’s end.
A well-designed, poignant story of the Holocaust told by two survivors.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781779410092
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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