Heartwarming yet at times amateurish; serves best to remind Americans who have studied German of the pleasures and pains...
In his memoir, a veterinarian for the U.S. Army relates his humorous struggle to master the local language while stationed in Germany.
With only a couple community college courses in German behind him, U.S. Army veterinarian Deigh found himself stationed in Germany. The shock of encountering what German was like out of the classroom led to a series of “Lessons”—vignettes of his experiences learning how the German language was used in the real world. Traversing Germany from Bremerhaven to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Deigh encountered odd idioms and nearly unintelligible dialects. In picturesque towns like Heidelberg, Rothenburg, and Nürnberg, Deigh mixed with the locals, found a girlfriend and wife, and overcame repeated stumbles—from confusing Staubsauger (vacuum cleaner) and Hubschrauber (helicopter) to realizing that a mere reflexive pronoun separates “undress” (sich umziehen) from “move house” (umziehen). Eventually, though, he arrived at a complete grasp of the language. The virtue of author Deigh’s debut effort is that it uses humor to describe encounters with a language that many Americans consider to be mostly humorless. For instance, a passage on the regional use of “gel” is amusing yet edifying. For those who have struggled with German, whether as a student or traveler, this book is a bit of nostalgia for common encounters with a language that is tightly structured and subtly nuanced. Entertaining though it is, this personal book is for family and friends more so than the general public. Punctuation and spelling errors are excessive, and the author’s command of German grammar is not impeccable. “Der Dame” is dative, not accusative. Likewise, he mistakenly says GmbH (meaning Inc. or LLC) is “Gesellschaft mit beshränkter”—not beschränkte—“Haftung.” However, perhaps to make up for the oversight, he proposes an amusing acronym for GmbH: “Geh mal Bier holen” (go get some beer). Grüss Gott should nevertheless have an umlaut, and in “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” it’s “four and twenty blackbirds,” not “one and twenty.” And that’s in English.
Heartwarming yet at times amateurish; serves best to remind Americans who have studied German of the pleasures and pains they share.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-595-53361-9
Page Count: 96
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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