An unbalanced collection of occasionally humorous essays that rarely strike an emotional chord.
A memoir of comedic holiday misadventure.
Memoirist Rouse (At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life, 2009, etc.) mashes up a lifetime of holiday debacles into a single book. Virtually every known celebration—from Christmas to Arbor Day—is exploited for humor's sake, and the author relies primarily on quick wit and artistic license to evoke a response from the reader. The results are mixed, particularly due to Rouse’s insistence on alienating much of his readership. To be fair, no one is spared the sharp barbs of his jokes—not rural family members, the obese, the ugly, or even Helen Keller—though some readers could interpret this oversimplification of humanity as a form of elitism or snobbery. When describing his chivalrous decision not to drink in front of his recovering-alcoholic partner, he wrote that to do otherwise would be “like those husbands who continue to bring their eight-hundred-pound wives honey buns and two-liter jugs of Mountain Dew before…their spouses are airlifted out of the trailer park.” Similarly, his pronouncement that “[i]f there is not a quality coffeehouse every one hundred feet, you're either driving in rural America or visiting a place you need to get the hell out of” is further fodder for anti-elitists. Rouse is most successful when he shows his heart alongside his humor. In “The Wonder Years,” he discusses how he and his partner opened their home for a dying dog, forcing them to glimpse their own mortality in the process, and “My Holiday Miracle” explores Rouse's attempt at comforting his mother as she nears death. Both of these essays offer rare, unrestricted access into the author’s emotional world.
An unbalanced collection of occasionally humorous essays that rarely strike an emotional chord.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-71871-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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