Warm and engaging: a piquant slice of a colorful life.
Swinging from tales of war zones to reminiscences of the men she met in them, former CNN reporter Darrow takes the reader on a 20-year trip through Russia and assorted hot spots around the globe.
In 1980, five years before perestroika transformed the Evil Empire, Darrow was a visiting university student in Moscow. Russia, she says, acted “like a narcotic.” Participating with the locals in their all-absorbing quest for subsistence, Darrow came under the thrall of life on the edge, fell in love with the Russian soul, and picked up a handsome husband who wanted a green card. Following the tumult, the urge for a normal job led her to Atlanta in 1986 to take a position as a tape logger at the fledgling Cable News Network. At the time, CNN was operating out of a former plantation, and “anyone with the desire to advance could do so with a bit of perseverance and hard work and willingness to work through weekends and holidays.” Darrow had the requisite attributes. Estranged though not divorced from her Russian husband, she stayed in Atlanta just long enough to have an affair with Ted Turner, discreetly discussed here, but was soon back in Russia as a field producer. She covered the civil war in Georgia, dashing through no-man's-land with Christiane Amanpour to enter the besieged Parliament building. After that it was on to the bombing in Chechnya, where “the Chechens were getting most of the arms from the Russian soldiers they were gearing up to fight, trading bottles of vodka or food for their kalashnikovs.” She moved on to the Balkans and then Israel, alternately covering battle scenes and jumping in and out of relationships with a series of unsuitable men (who nonetheless make for interesting reading).
Warm and engaging: a piquant slice of a colorful life.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-72134-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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