The lives of few American labor leaders have been given as thorough and caring an examination as that of Sidney Hillman in this massive biography by Fraser, the executive editor of Basic Books. Fraser shows how Hillman's early experience as an agitator in revolutionary Russia and as an immigrant toiling in America's textile industry shaped his outlook on the ``labor question'' for the rest of his life. Indeed, Fraser depicts how Hillman's passionate belief in the dignity of working people translated into his advocacy of a national labor policy that would shield American workers from the vicissitudes of the market system and provide them with economic security and equal rights in the work place. The author also painstakingly details how this led Hillman to seek an alliance with progressive industrialists and leaders of the Democratic Party to achieve his goals. Hillman's successes, from the Protocols of Peace to the organizing of the CIO, and his access to Franklin Roosevelt (memorialized in FDR's quip, ``Clear it with Sidney''), contained, Fraser argues, the seeds of organized labor's fall in the decades after WW II—a crucial paradox to Fraser, for as Hillman and organized labor succeeded in improving the living standards of American workers, they did so by forsaking their demand to include labor's voice in managing the American economy. An impressive work that both vividly documents the life of one of America's foremost labor leaders and manages to address a number of questions about the rise and fall of American labor and the Democratic Party over the course of the 20th century.
Pub Date: June 25, 1991
ISBN: 0-02-910630-3
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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