A bit long, but a fitting tribute to one of the great purveyors of light—though not insubstantial—entertainment.
A graceful biography of the most British of all humorous novelists.
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881–1975) was born at the height of the Victorian era to middle-class colonial administrators who left their children in the care of a nanny in England and barely saw them during their childhood. Wodehouse compensated, McCrum argues convincingly, as a youth by throwing himself cheerfully into the hierarchical world of the English boarding school, as an adult by throwing himself into work. Fortunately for readers around the world, his work turned out to be the creation of a series of brilliant comic archetypes: first, Psmith and Ukbridge, then the immortal manservant Jeeves and his foolish but sweet employer, Bertie Wooster, in a series of novels anchored in the secure Edwardian world of Plum’s young manhood. (His lively lyrics for Broadway’s pioneering Princess Theatre musicals, and his long-term sojourn in America, are also given their due.) Wodehouse put his foot wrong only once, when as a resident in occupied France he was interned by the Nazis during WWII and foolishly agreed to several radio interviews that forever tarnished his reputation and prompted charges of treason in his besieged homeland. British publisher/author McCrum (My Year Off, 1998, etc.) doesn’t gloss over the appalling lack of political sense that embroiled Wodehouse in this public relations disaster, concluding that “the moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him”—obsessed as always with the need to work and the desire to please his audience. But he judges his subject gently, backed up by no less an authority than George Orwell, as a duffer rather than a traitor who paid the price in declining sales and dismissal as the bard of a vanished age after the war. His biographer captures the warmth and charm of a man who wanted only to amuse, who loved his party-girl wife and his Pekinese dogs and his daily exercise.
A bit long, but a fitting tribute to one of the great purveyors of light—though not insubstantial—entertainment.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05159-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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