Honest and unsparing, though sometimes repetitive, this memoir is at its best when exploring the challenges faced, and...
A frank account of a woman’s rapid rise and scandalous fall in the Marines during the Reagan era.
Crow (Creative Writing/Eckerd Coll.) begins in an interrogation room where she was being questioned in preparation for a potential court-martial on charges of conduct unbecoming an officer. The author returns to this room, and that time period, intermittently throughout the book. Otherwise, the story progresses in roughly chronological order: Crow’s entrance into the Marines as a teenager seeking to escape alcoholism (her own and her father’s); her successful career as a military journalist; her personal struggles with marriage and motherhood. A particularly strong theme is the way the military was unable to see beyond her unmistakably feminine body: “Despite the personal challenges I had overcome—alcoholism, self-loathing, laziness—I could never defeat the signals my body sent the world.” Crow’s response to sexism and harassment was to starve herself to make weight and ignore a serious health problem in order to complete an assignment—a decision that had devastating consequences. By the end of the book, what seemed like shocking conduct at the beginning is placed in the context of the author’s drive for a life with purpose, and we see that the decision she made to resolve her situation is a true sacrifice on her part. At times the author’s prose is stilted, and she often relies too heavily on a few phrases (e.g., “hot blood,” “too-tight bra”).
Honest and unsparing, though sometimes repetitive, this memoir is at its best when exploring the challenges faced, and sacrifices demanded, by women in the armed forces.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3504-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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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