by Sylvia Ruth Gutmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2018
An insightful effort to bring some clarity to an incomprehensible wartime catastrophe.
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In this debut memoir, a woman recalls her childhood escape from Europe after the Nazis murdered her parents and the traumatic aftermath.
Gutmann was born in 1939 in Belgium, only months after her Jewish parents were forced into exile from their home in Berlin, fleeing the Nazis. They lived in hiding but were ultimately discovered by Vichy agents. In 1942, when the author was 3 years old, she and her mother and two older sisters were held captive at an internment camp in France. Her mother was then shipped to Auschwitz, where both of Gutmann’s parents were eventually killed. “In the face of the unknown,” the author writes, “Mama made a heart-wrenching choice to leave us behind with a stranger who promised to save our lives.” The author and her siblings were furtively sent to Switzerland by this mysterious woman. Gutmann stayed with an aunt in Zurich before leaving for New York by boat with her sisters in 1946. The author lived with her Uncle Sam and Aunt Gerdy and was ordered to forget her harrowing past. A second-grade teacher—at 7, Gutmann had never attended school before—accused her of lying when she spoke frankly of her travails. And Gerdy was mercilessly cruel, physically and verbally abusive. The author sought solace in the arms of exploitive men, and by 23 had weathered a string of failed relationships and two abortions. When her sister Rita, whom she idolized, died after a long illness in 1993, Gutmann was compelled to confront the pain of a lost childhood. In the hope of finding emotional resolution, she traveled to Germany and France, attempting to find the woman who had saved her life. The author’s story is heart-rending, told with an unflinching confessional candor (Recalling the stressful voyage to New York, she writes: “To every woman on the ship who looks kindly at me, I plead, ‘Will you be my mommy?’ ”). She delicately depicts the psychological fallout of the Holocaust—those who survived were pulverized by guilt, and the resources necessary to help them didn’t really exist. As one of Gutmann’s therapists explained, “For three decades, the traumatized survivors and guilt-ridden American Jews, who regretted that they had not done more to rescue their brethren, were frozen in silence.” This is an achingly beautiful account that includes emotionally affecting personal photographs.
An insightful effort to bring some clarity to an incomprehensible wartime catastrophe.Pub Date: July 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944037-95-6
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Epigraph Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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