Though dry in tone, the book is haunting in scope and depth.
A foremost Holocaust scholar carefully reflects on his harsh early years and lifelong academic mission in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Geneva, and Los Angeles.
Writing this second memoir (When Memory Comes, 1977) in his early 80s, Friedländer (Emeritus, History/UCLA; Franz Kafka: Poet of Shame and Guilt, 2013, etc.) is acutely aware of a deteriorating memory and the need for emotional elucidation. He uses his early trauma of losing his parents during a roundup of Jews in southern France in 1942 as the point of departure for exploring the upheaval that characterized much of his adult life. Hidden in a Catholic seminary, the author was essentially orphaned when his parents were arrested at the Swiss border and sent to Auschwitz. Schooled in France as a fervent Catholic, Friedländer eventually ran away to join the Irgun youth movement in the new state of Israel in 1948—he admits his “core identity” is being a nonreligious Jew “yet indelibly marked by the Shoah. Ultimately, I am nothing else.” From there, he began a peripatetic existence pursuing political science in Paris and becoming World Jewish Congress President Nachum Goldman’s political secretary and later Shimon Peres’ assistant, spending most of his time in Jerusalem. Ultimately, Friedländer would become both an apologist for Israeli policies and a critic of its racism toward the Palestinians. However, he embarked on graduate work in international studies in Geneva in 1961, pursuing his studies in his “monomaniacal way,” supporting a family yet suffering from debilitating anxiety that required intensive drugs as well as psychoanalysis. His initial book exposing the complicity between Pius XII and the Nazi regime led him to devote his subsequent work to European fascism, modern anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. A “difficult stay in Berlin in the mid-eighties,” when he was confronted by a new wave of “apologetic” scholarship about Nazi Germany, reinforced his decision about his work.
Though dry in tone, the book is haunting in scope and depth.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59051-809-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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