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REQUIEM LETTERS

Name: REQUIEM LETTERS
Author: Ronald Senator
ISBN: 0-7145-2999-0

by Ronald Senator ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1996

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A disturbing real-life tale, made more chilling by this ill- wrought account. In 1950, Senator, at the time a mental patient, miraculously survived a prefrontal leucotomy—a crude brain operation that should have left him ``some kind of vegetable or monster.'' Thirteen years later he married Dita (her last name isn't given), a Czech woman who survived the horrors of Auschwitz. Their life together ended tragically in 1981 when Dita died of ovarian cancer. Senator, now a composer, here employs a seemingly sweet though unlikely device to tell their story: the couple ``exchange'' more than 29 letters—with Senator doing the writing for both. Unfortunately, he proves a self-important and vaguely offensive narrator. He writes: ``It was always our joke, wasn't it, darling, that you went to . . . a University of Life—or rather, of Death, at the same time that I went to Oxford. . . . That blue-black number tattooed on your arm was your graduation certificate!'' And throughout the ``correspondence,'' Senator offers little sense of Dita's personality or character beyond her ``victim'' status; he sensationalizes images of Auschwitz; and he constantly brags about his accomplishments (e.g., he writes to Dita of the premiere performance of the Holocaust Requiem he composed in her memory, ``Did you recognize your name inscribed into so many great waves of sound? . . . To tell the truth, I'm astonished at what a big social event it all turned out to be''). It's a pity, because the central story of two ``victims of [their] times'' is remarkable, and the questions they grappled with are meaningful—why they endured ordeals that destroyed many others, or how Senator's misery, indeed any suffering, can be compared with the Holocaust. That Senator concludes with a letter to Dita about his glitzy new life with his sexy new wife (whom he met just three months after Dita's death) merely heightens one's sense of having taken an unpleasant journey in bad company.

Pub Date: March 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-7145-2999-0

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Marion Boyars

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)