A sturdy book of traditional wisdom and prescriptions for recovery.
An Ojibwa author fulfills his obligation by passing down his life’s wisdom to his son.
Before his death in 2017, Wagamese (Starlight, 2018, etc.) had earned renown in his native Canada for his memoirs and novels. He had also completed this book for his son, then 6 years old. As he explains to the son who barely knew him, “drinking is why we are separated. That’s the plain and simple truth of it. I was a drunk and never faced the truth about myself—that I was a drunk. Booze owned me.” The author then proceeds to revisit a childhood of foster homes and adoption, of feeling like he never fit in or belonged, and of running away to find comfort in transient street life and a community of sorts among others who lived a life of petty crime to subsidize their various addictions. He writes about his search for identity in Ojibwa traditions and what he later considered the misguided “influence of militant Native groups like the American Indian Movement.” “I became racist in my thinking,” he writes, “and it was easy to blame the white man and society for my ordeals. In fact, it made more sense than anything I’d thought of or heard before.” Much of the narrative follows Wagamese’s three days in the wilderness, with only a blanket, at the behest of a recovering alcoholic who thought Ojibwa teachings could help his friend in recovery. Only after he finished was the author told that this had been his “Vision Quest.” The author mixes reflections on the course of his life with dreams he had during those three nights along with Native legends and traditions, illuminating the significance of the pipe and the drum. “As Ojibway men, we are taught that it is the father’s responsibility to introduce our children to the world,” he writes to his son, and this posthumous publication is part of the legacy he passes along.
A sturdy book of traditional wisdom and prescriptions for recovery.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-57131-389-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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