An excellent biography, worthy of shelving alongside Francis Wheen’s Karl Marx: A Life (2000).
A welcome life of Karl Marx’s factotum, benefactor and co-author, who talked a good revolutionary game while living a happily bourgeois life.
The little town of Wuppertal, Germany, where Friedrich Engels was born in 1820, shows little interest in its native son these days. The same holds in great swaths of territory that lay behind the erstwhile Iron Curtain. There, writes Hunt (History/Univ. of London; Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, 2005), “Engels has become an unknown and unremarkable part of the civic wallpaper.” Perhaps surprisingly to contemporary readers, Engels had a fine head for the details of business and made a considerable fortune in the ascendant years of industrialism. Just as surprisingly, he enjoyed that wealth and the things it bought, not least of them a small army of prostitutes over the years. He was also a great admirer of the eminent conservative writer Thomas Carlyle, who was a noted Germanophile but no socialist. None of these quirks of personality or peccadilloes detracts from Engels’s contributions to socialism, however. After Marx’s death, writes Hunt, Engels modestly gave his friend almost all the credit for that work, saying only, “I cannot deny that both before and during my forty years’ collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundations of the theory.” Yet Engels’s economic journalism and historical awareness were critical to socialist and communist thought, allowing Marx to arrive at conclusions that seem very modern today—particularly the phenomena of globalism, which the two foresaw a century and a half ago, and modern imperialism, which Engels connected to “class structure.” Hunt’s narrative is lively and consistently engaging—so much so that readers will hardly divine the endless dull patches in works such as Das Capital—and admiring without being uncritical, given how things turned out. Engels was a “Victorian embodiment of self-sacrifice and self-contradiction,” Hunt concludes.
An excellent biography, worthy of shelving alongside Francis Wheen’s Karl Marx: A Life (2000).Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8025-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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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