Powerful reading for students of European history.
A Latvian activist affectingly reconstructs the tragic stories of her grandparents and parents, who were persecuted by the Soviet occupiers and deported to Siberia.
The prosperous Dreifelds and the working-class Kalnietis families were among the many Latvians blindsided by the signing of a nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on Aug. 24, 1939. It divided Europe into two “spheres of influence,” and Latvia, along with Estonia and Lithuania, came under Soviet sway. Soviet military bases were established, an ominous mass repatriation of Germans followed and Latvia’s fragile 20-year-old independence was effectively eclipsed. Fourteen-year-old Ligita Dreifelde, the author’s mother, was arrested in the middle of the night on June 14, 1941, along with her mother and father. Wearing her precious dance shoes, she was transported in a cattle car crammed with 15,000 other unfortunates to the Siberian wilderness. She and her mother were separated from her father, who died shortly thereafter, though they did not officially learn his fate until 1990. They eked out a harsh living, and Ligita was granted permission to go home to Latvia in 1948. Toward the end of 1949, however, she was deported again, though not in time to reunite with her mother, who died alone on Feb. 4, 1950. In the Siberian village of Togur, Ligita met Aivars Kalnietis, exiled with his mother in March 1949 as the relatives of a “bandit.” (His father had joined the partisans resisting Soviet occupation in the countryside.) They married, and the author was born in Togur in1952. Her parents, forced to work in Soviet factories, vowed never to have another child: “We won’t give birth to any more slaves!” Although they were finally allowed to return to Latvia in 1957, the memories remained of their grim trials and the loved ones left behind in Siberian graves. Sometimes the author presents these trials in such dense detail that she loses sight of the bigger picture, but the diaries and eyewitness accounts offer a remarkable testimony of human fortitude.
Powerful reading for students of European history.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56478-545-9
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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 autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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