A sensitive, mostly enjoyable memoir of making a life on Tahiti.
A lushly described account of daily life in Tahiti from an outsider’s perspective.
Turnbull (Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris, 2003) and her husband, who brought them to Tahiti from Paris for a work assignment, socialized, worked, traveled and ultimately made a home for themselves in a place many consider to be solely a vacation destination. As an Australian with a French husband, and given Tahiti’s complicated history with France, the author is admirably sensitive to cultural differences. Her portrayal of the islands and their people isn’t romanticized or naïve; she is cleareyed about the negative aspects of her life there. Her neighbors and friends are people, not exotic props, and she develops genuine connections to them. Another thread of the narrative is the author’s infertility and ultimately successful attempt to conceive through in vitro fertilization. As important as the medical journey is her emotional one: Though she had undergone the process in France and had given up on pregnancy, a remark from her therapist motivated her to try again. Her description of a harrowing accident that befell her son is all the more poignant since we know that he was the result of a “precious pregnancy.” All of her experiences—her daily swim in the lagoon, a walk through the local (and only) town or the exhilaration of snorkeling—are richly rendered in expressive language. The book is frank and personal, and at times, it feels like reading the author’s diary. This is also a drawback, however; though it is well-written and edited, there is little sense of pacing or balance.
A sensitive, mostly enjoyable memoir of making a life on Tahiti.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59240-868-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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