The author’s detractors will likely find fault, but this is a fitting cap to a sui generis career, equally satisfying in...
The first memoir from the idiosyncratic novelist, who claims that if “it doesn’t read like a normal memoir, that may be because I haven’t exactly led what most normal people would consider a normal life.”
Indeed. The narrative—comprised of a series of vignettes from various points in the author’s eventful life and appropriately spiked with deliciously mischievous language and philosophical musings—may be “somewhat subject to the effects of mnemonic erosion,” but it is piquant and intriguing nonetheless. In roughly chronological order, Robbins (B Is for Beer, 2009, etc.) covers his childhood in Blowing Rock, N.C.; his move to and residence in Richmond, Va., in which he discovered and thrived in the one enclave in town not considered ultraconservative; his time at Hargrave Military Academy and two years at Washington and Lee; his experiences in the Air Force as a meteorologist in Korea and at Strategic Air Command in Nebraska; his post at the Richmond Times-Dispatch; his move to Seattle and eventual assumption of the position of arts critic at the Seattle Times; and his brush with the FBI, who thought he might have been the Unabomber. As can be expected from Robbins, each short section is subject to digressions and thoughtful pauses, only a few of which linger a bit too long. His chronicle of the writing and publication of Another Roadside Attraction (1971) does not occur until nearly halfway through the book, and the author glides through the rest of his oeuvre (Still Life with Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume et al.) with less reflection. Most readers, even die-hard Robbins fans, won’t mind, however. They will enjoy this peek into the intelligently goofy and always fertile mind of this inventive writer, who riffs on everything from women and drugs to the publishing industry, conceptions of spirituality and the countless culinary wonders of kimchi.
The author’s detractors will likely find fault, but this is a fitting cap to a sui generis career, equally satisfying in short installments or read straight through.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-226740-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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IN THE NEWS
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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