Eisenfeld writes about Shenandoah the way Annie Proulx writes about Wyoming or Edward Abbey about the deserts of the...
A complicated history of conservation.
Like many visitors to national parks, Eisenfeld (MA Writing Program/Johns Hopkins Univ.) assumed that the land had always been wilderness. One day, however, in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, she came upon “an incongruous, well-maintained cemetery in the middle of the forest” and realized that the land once had been a community where people lived, worked and buried their dead. For the next two decades, she hiked off-trail, bushwhacking, in search of the park’s past. The author’s vivid debut work of nonfiction recounts that search: a memoir of her explorations into places “not curated for beauty”; a capsule history of the conservation movement that created such spectacular sites as Yosemite, Yellowstone and Shenandoah; and, based on interviews and archival sources, stories of families whose homes and lives were threatened by their government’s good intentions. The Shenandoah project, she learned, was begun by an act of Congress in 1926, which mandated the government to create a national park in Virginia—convenient for the growing mid-Atlantic population—by gaining title from landowners. A condition of the bill stipulated that the government would buy no land; instead, it expected donations. Lawmakers who enacted the bill assumed that the area’s few inhabitants, “the nameless and faceless mountaineers,” would not object to leaving “what many outsiders considered their godforsaken, hardscrabble homes.” However, the lawmakers were surprised: Their surveyors returned, reporting “that the area wasn’t quite the wilderness the park promoters had depicted” but rather “encompassed 5,650 tracts and 3,250 homes,” with orchards, gardens, gristmills, blacksmith shops and cemeteries. Some residents had lost deeds; others adamantly refused to be dispossessed. The next years saw conflicts and evictions, protests and lawsuits, and often stalwart resistance.
Eisenfeld writes about Shenandoah the way Annie Proulx writes about Wyoming or Edward Abbey about the deserts of the Southwest: pristine, unsentimental, eloquent prose.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3830-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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