A fictional memoir, intended as a tribute to Ward's grandmother, that crackles with good humor and good dialogue. As a young teen, Ward (The Cactus Garden, 1995) struggled over the break-up of his parents' marriage in the '50s and '60s. He also fought to come to terms with the moral imperatives of the civil- rights movement in Baltimore—where lived his mostly absent Marine captain grandfather and Grace, a grandmother of ``intelligence, passion and guiding spirit.'' Her past, however, hid a baffling mystery. When his parents' bickering finally grew unbearable, 15- year-old Robert hiked off to live nearby with Grace. She was respected in the neighborhood, except by the Walkers, a redneck chorus of stinkers, ``drunken and criminal.'' Life with Grace was never less than interesting, what with her exotic dinner guests, her quest to learn about Gandhi, and her yen for discussing literature. For Grace, who'd been forced to leave school early to work in the mills, was eager for knowledge. Then came the day when Negroes appeared in her lily-white Methodist church. The impressive black preacher/leader heads their way for dinner (while confronting heckling sonic booms from the Walkers), and Robert, who'd decided to integrate the local gym for kids, awaits Grace's active participation in marching for civil rights. Why is she backing down? Robert, trying to fathom the heroic past of his formerly distanced grandfather (Union martyrdom), hears of Grace's own Union past. But still there remains the conundrum of her reluctance to join in the marching—until she confesses her own tortured spirit, the result of an early ``betrayal,'' one that explains sundry cries in the night and Grace's ``spells.'' Triumphant close; ghostly visitation. A convincing portrait, despite some broad brushwork, of an earlier, gutsier Baltimore.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-307-44007-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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