A compassionate memoir of self-discovery.
A British-American journalist’s account of growing up the daughter of a fugitive father.
Until she was 9, Wetherall knew herself as Tyler Kane, the daughter of an American businessman and a former British model. Her family lived a peripatetic life that had taken them to “thirteen houses, five countries and two continents” before she was 10; yet Wetherall never saw these moves as odd. But when Scotland Yard detectives questioned her mother about a man they called Ben Glaser, the author suddenly realized that her entire life had been a lie. Everything—from her last name to the travels that had taken her family from California to Italy, Portugal, France, and Britain—had been ruses her father used to evade capture for criminal activity. Shuttling deftly between present and past, Wetherall pieces together the fragments of early years spent on the run to make sense of her life and her relationship to her fugitive father. She visited him in secret at hideouts in France and on the island of St. Lucia and came to know him as the man who had made his fortune smuggling marijuana from Thailand. Desperately confused, the author struggled to reconcile “the Dad who spent hours, years, teaching me how to swim, how to ski, [and] how to ride a bike” with the criminal sought by international authorities. Glaser was finally captured when the author was 12, and for the next several years, she visited him at the California prison where he served his sentence. Her unresolved rage toward her father wrought havoc with her teenage years. Eventually, she made peace with him, realizing that for all she had lost, she had regained both a father and a new perspective on a life story he had helped define. Revealing and emotionally nuanced, Wetherall’s book probes the dark underside of family relationships to uncover the meaning of acceptance and forgiveness.
A compassionate memoir of self-discovery.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-11219-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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