Likely to be frequently cited during the bicentennial celebration of Lincoln’s birth.
Huntington Library fellow White (The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words, 2005, etc.) offers a lively, comprehensive life of the 16th president.
Known variously throughout his career as “Honest Abe,” “Old Abe,” “the Rail-Splitter,” “the original gorilla,” “the dictator,” “the Great Emancipator” and “Father Abraham,” Lincoln referred to himself in famously self-deprecating terms and signed his name simply as “A. Lincoln.” That’s all that was simple, though, about this unusually “shut-mouthed” man, who from youth burned for public distinction. White’s highly readable, picturesque presentation follows Lincoln’s life from the pioneer birth and boyhood to the presidential assassination, with especially good passages on Lincoln’s ancestry, his Springfield law practice and his emergence from the political wilderness in 1858. White doesn’t shy away from Lincoln’s shortcomings—his ferocious ambition, his opportunism, his woeful performance as a husband—but this mostly admiring treatment highlights his virtues, not least his ability to draw on the talents of diverse personalities, use the best of their advice and deftly manipulate them to advantage, whether as a militia captain, a state legislator, a party organizer a candidate or a president. White’s triumph, though, is his focus on the forging of Lincoln’s moral character—how the private man used contemplation, reading, experience, the press of events and the teachings of his political heroes to clarify his own political identity. Splendidly, and unsurprisingly given his past scholarship, White pays particular attention to language, referencing the innumerable scraps of paper Lincoln wrote to himself, public and private letters and formal addresses. He graphically depicts Lincoln thinking, first tentatively, and then logically working through the thicket of a problem to a lawyerly understanding and, finally, with his singular combination of “homely and high language,” to an exquisite expression of meaning and purpose.
Likely to be frequently cited during the bicentennial celebration of Lincoln’s birth.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6499-1
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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