Tales from a rich, cross-cultural life by a renowned Indian peace activist. Kumar’s exceptional spiritual journey began at age nine, when he was accepted into training as a Jain monk. He learned Sanskrit, meditation, and extreme discipline (one of the rigors of the order was to have one’s hair plucked, not cut, from the head), but as an adolescent he began to question the purpose of the life of solitude and study. He left the monkhood and attended university, became entrenched in the ideology of Gandhi, and entered into an arranged (and passionless) marriage, which ended abruptly as his commitment to itinerant peace activism grew. Kumar began traveling the globe, preaching of the need for nuclear disarmament, worker’s unions, and organic farming. Most of these travels he made on foot, walking from village to village through India, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, continental Europe, England (which he reached by train), and finally America (arriving on board the Queen Mary, thanks to a generous sponsor). The latter half of the book is absorbed with a more settled life, as Kumar founded an activist English newspaper called Resurgence, married again and had two more children, and tried his hand at small-scale organic farming in the English countryside. Now in his 60s, Kumar still makes walking pilgrimages, especially around milestone birthdays. In monk’s fashion, along the way he has simply trusted in the hospitality of whomever he might meet at his daily destination, and most of the stories testify to the universal kindness of individuals. For a freewheeling wanderer, he fills this autobiography with many niggling details that weigh it down (precisely how the auction prices proceeded for his English farm, exactly which vegetarian dishes were served at people’s homes, etc.). Yet this concrete attention to minutiae also prevents the memoir from becoming mired in the many abstract ideals Kumar embraces, and grounds it in refreshing reality.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16402-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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