A powerful memoir of deep loss driven by the author’s desire to get at harrowing answers to difficult questions.
The poignant memoir of two brothers raised under the dark shadow of Indian Partition who forged wildly different paths in life.
Dutta (Bloodlines: The Imperial Roots of Terrorism in South Asia, 2015, etc.) and his older brother, Kaushal (“Raju”), were born in the late 1960s to poor Hindu refugees in Jaipur. Their Indian father, a government clerk, had arrived in 1959, forced by the violence after the Partition to flee his homeland. From enjoying the status of Brahmin to living in a near-destitute condition, the family spiraled over the decades into “bitter shame” and familial squabbles, a toxic atmosphere in which Dutta and Raju were raised. While Raju was by nature precocious, charming, and daring, the author, in contrast, grew inward, becoming idealistic and shy. In moving, honest prose, Dutta follows the disparate trajectories of their lives. Raju became entangled in a relationship with a rich, older gay man, which propelled him into posh jet-setting and eventually a criminal life abroad. Meanwhile, the author fell in love with an American woman and followed her to America in 1986. Dutta went to school, became a research biologist and then, in an odd but determined turn, a police officer in Los Angeles and a professor of homeland security and issues-involved terrorism. Meanwhile, Raju descended into the life of a con man and, later, terrorist. Both were cancer survivors. The memoir opens with a shattering call from France, where Raju had married and was living, to notify the author that his brother had been incarcerated for murder. Throughout, Dutta captures the enormous sense of humiliation wrought by this crisis; in Indian society, he writes, “the responsibility for a crime lies not with the perpetrator, but with the entire family.”
A powerful memoir of deep loss driven by the author’s desire to get at harrowing answers to difficult questions.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-279585-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Anthony Bourdain/Ecco
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
