An eloquent and charming, if somewhat aimless, memoir and travelogue.
A posthumous collection of essays and musings by a well-traveled man.
Thomas “Tom” Peyton, born in Duluth, Minn., saw many of the world’s sights over the course of his 91 years, from the Eiffel Tower to Ivory Coast. Although his debut memoir focuses primarily on his international travel, his memories of his Midwestern upbringing also appear. For example, in his opening essay, “Domestic Animals in My Life,” he offers an overly extensive history of his family’s dogs. However, readers may have liked to have learned more about the people in his “eminently Victorian household,” over which his father “ruled.” Peyton also recalls his encounters with several iconic historical figures—some at a great distance, others close enough for a handshake. As a spectator at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for example, 17-year-old Peyton found Adolf Hitler to be “a small man of undistinguished shape and clothed in…rather ill-fitting military garb.” He adds, rather chillingly: “This was the man destined to play such a huge part in…the future of every one of us.” Of his service in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, Peyton writes, “I never left an occupation more willingly.” He joined the Peace Corps in 1962, answering what he called his “ethical demands,” and met President John F. Kennedy in the process. Peyton’s time in the Peace Corps inspired some of his best writing, not only in his memoirs, but also in his letters to his mother, in which he detailed the joys and frustrations of teaching in Ivory Coast. His sense of humor and prose skills also emerge, as in his description of “colonial society”: “[H]eavy men purple with drink and very liverish; women waiting only to be repatriated, totally without curiosity toward the world in which they find themselves.” The writing veers toward dry reportage when he chronicles his travels later in life, joined by his friend Osama Ettouney. Peyton eventually covered a truly impressive amount of ground, including Egypt, Greece, the Czech Republic, Italy, Brussels, Portugal and Luxembourg. At times, the author’s visual imagery is sharp (as when he describes “[e]meralds the size of a giant’s fingernail” in Istanbul, but more often, he simply retells the history of the world he so eagerly explored.
An eloquent and charming, if somewhat aimless, memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490593616
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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