Flawed, but in patches a vivid depiction of an unorthodox school and its controversial director.
A New York City investment banker recounts his long haul through a childhood and adolescence of emotional troubles.
By the time he was eight, Eliot remembers, he saw dangers everywhere. In response, he became verbally vicious, full of rage and sadness, arrogance and grandiosity. In profound disequilibrium, he was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic. Here, recounting his 13 years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School in Chicago, he tries to crawl back into the skin of the boy who never felt comfortable in that skin. Bettelheim would have approved, for it was his conviction that to help a disturbed child, you first had to see the world as the child did. But Eliot is a different creature now, and it is difficult for him to coax his strange younger self onto the page, despite reference to notes taken by his counselors. However, he is eloquent in describing the Orthogenic School’s routines and in weaving his progress through them, from the battling child who established a relationship with another person for the first time, to the golden middle years when he started to catch glimpses of his behavior in a context other than his own, to the desire to be free of observation and others’ control. Also sharp is Eliot’s portrait of Bettelheim, contradictions and brilliance and all. A genius at “digging out the underlying truth about an issue,” the psychologist had less attractive traits, including a weakness for humiliating students and an inability to adequately contend with teenage sexual issues. Yet he created an environment that could foster and re-create personality, at least for some. Eliot knows that leaving the school at age 21 to attend Yale was not a miracle or a matter of luck, but the result of counselors who knew he had “a streak of sanity somewhere” and helped him find, mine, and refine it.
Flawed, but in patches a vivid depiction of an unorthodox school and its controversial director.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30749-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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