The riveting adventure of a red-haired country girl who became, in Smith's characterization, the last of the great courtesans and an internationally recognized diplomat. Pamela Harriman's life is the stuff of romance novels. The seductive heroine dallies with a series of rich and well-born lovers, including not only first husband Randolph Churchill, but American diplomat Averell Harriman, broadcasting legend Edward R. Murrow, millionaires Jock Whitney, Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, and Elie de Rothschild. Not the least of her admirers (but not her lover) was Winston Churchill, who was genuinely fond of his daughter-in-law. She in turn played on the Churchill name to bolster a brilliant career on the international social circuit, further enhanced by her marriage to American theatrical producer Leland Hayward. Widowed by Hayward, she married former lover Averell Harriman. After Harriman's death and with his legacy, she used her charm and social skills to become the ``den mother'' of the Democratic Party, earning an appointment as ambassador to France. Relying on many of the same sources but without the sour bite of Christopher Ogden's 1994 Harriman biography, Smith (In All His Glory: William S. Paley, 1990) gives us a portrait of a woman who has left many wounded in her wake (including her neglected son), but who has spent her life, as she wanted to, at the center of power and wealth. She brings Harriman's story up to the present, with a detailed portrait of her acrimonious feud with the other Harriman heirs. Attractive but not beautiful, charming but not witty or well educated, how did Pam do it? As many of her famous predecessors, like Pompadour and de Maintenon, did: With extraordinary determination and by catering to her man. Sure to ruffle the feathers of feminists, but a convincing depiction of an era not very long ago when the only route to the top for a woman of average ability and above-average ambition was in the wake of a man. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen). (First serial to Vanity Fair)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80950-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
