by Sheila Isenberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 2001
An undistinguished biography of a problematic hero.
The life of a little-known American WWII hero.
Varian Fry is the only American honored at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial. And he’s there with good cause—in the year and a half after the fall of France and before the implementation of the Final Solution, Fry smuggled hundreds of thinkers, artists, and other at-risk Jews out of France and into America. Outwardly, Fry was an American Schindler, and this is certainly how Isenberg would like the reader to view her hero. However, there is something incongruous in the author’s praise for Fry, and the character that emerges from her own text. Fry went to France to save writers, artists, and intellectuals. He selected whom to help, and those he decided society would not miss were left behind. Selection involved an ugly calculus that Fry ultimately regretted, but accepted. This problem is compounded by Fry’s own noblesse oblige attitude towards his task. He rarely spared himself any comfort, took a little too much pleasure from hanging out with the famous among the exiled, and complained of being overworked. On one particularly trying day, he confessed, “I was actually glad to have a few of the most insistent and pestiferous ‘clients’ carried shrieking off.” Fry’s life was also marked by a reflexive contempt for authority, which consistently undermined his “brilliance.” It was in France that Fry fulfilled his potential. His job required working around the authorities, and he excelled. His employers, however, were never comfortable with his work. Although Isenberg faults their failure to understand occupied France, one cannot help but wonder if their primary complaint—that his staff of 21 was too large—was not correct. Fry returned to the US expecting a hero’s welcome, which he never received. Now, at a time when Americans are determined to leave no corner of WWII bravery un-praised, Fry has found his trumpeter. But despite both Isenberg’s and his wishes, heroism, even when great, can be ugly.
An undistinguished biography of a problematic hero.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50221-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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