A thoroughly classy profile of the famously demanding founder and editor of the New Yorker. In getting this well-rounded portrait of Ross (18921951) on paper, the first-time biographer has balanced large details with small. Kunkel straightforwardly records how a high-school dropout, bitten by the reporting bug, propelled himself from the American West into WW I (where he helped develop Stars and Stripes) and then in 1925 was positioned for launching what was long considered the world's best magazine. Which was not, Ross wrote in his prospectus (included here), meant to attract ``the old lady from Dubuque.'' Ross slapped his materializing dream into shape with the aid of writers, editors, and friends like Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, John O'Hara, Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, Katharine Angell White, William Shawn, and James Cagney. They're all here, waving their tics and peccadilloes like banners. He details the intricacies of Ross's troubled relationships with his three wives and with co-founder Raoul Fleischmann. A prankster and a worrier, and a man with hair like ``a privet hedge'' and ``a notoriously limp handshake,'' Ross had many qualities that recommended him—and lots that didn't. Kunkel doesn't miss any of it—the Algonquin Round Table, the meager Depression coverage, the extensive WW II coverage, the decision to run John Hersey's ``Hiroshima''—while making the overriding point that no one racks up these kinds of accomplishments by accident; he dispels the popular ``caricature'' of Ross as a rude rube who miraculously produced the urbane New Yorker. Kunkel observes that ``the man from Aspen was an outsider set loose in New York, exhilarated, intimidated, and appalled by turns at what he saw, but never, ever bored.'' Kunkel writes with such fair-mindedness and so convincingly that readers, including the old lady from Dubuque, will need to remind themselves that they didn't know Ross personally.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41837-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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
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