greatest horrors of the war. (60 photos)
The Holocaust account of Gustav Mahler's niece, who went from being the musical heiress of Europe to conducting a
women's orchestra at Auschwitz. There was a fictional treatment of Alma Ros‚'s story in the1980 film Playing for Time, but Canadian journalist Newman and Oregon book publisher Kirtley build this impressive book with much documentation. We are shown Ros‚’s SS order of transport and the passenger list, as well as excerpts from correspondence and interviews with relatives, friends, and the camp performers she rescued from the death chambers. The grand opera of Ros‚'s life follows two acts—before and after Austria's Anschluss (union) with Nazi Germany. Ros‚ (n‚e Rosenberg) was born in Vienna to a distinguished musical family honored by Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef. Her relatives and friends formed a veritable Who's Who of Viennese musical society, a Jewish elite that was much resented by the larger Austrian culture as a foreign clan. Writing letters to try to get Ros‚'s father out of the country were such luminaries as Toscanini, Thomas Mann, and Einstein. Her father's legal and medical condition kept Ros‚ close enough to be arrested by the Nazis. The authors vividly portray every step in her riches-to-rags horrors: Ros‚'s group of inmates were at first chosen to become guinea pigs for experiments in mass sterilization by X-ray. “Faced with the unimaginable circumstances of the Experimental Block at Auschwitz, Alma resorted to the two tools at her disposal: her personality and her music.” These powerful tools ordered a piano, organized many performers into a troupe, and saved many lives. When Ros‚ herself sickened and died before liberation, Dr. Mengele actually tried to save her. Valuable materials include chapter notes, interviews, sources, a bibliography, the Mahler-Ros‚ family tree, a detailed list of the women's orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a glossary of camp terms. This well-researched and highly readable biography provides a moving account of one woman’s confrontation with the
greatest horrors of the war. (60 photos)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57467-051-4
Page Count: 412
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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