A cultural history of Key West as experienced by some of its most famous residents.
McKeen (Journalism/Boston Univ.; Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, 2008, etc.) transports readers to Key West, a wonderland of cigar rollers and beautiful women that for generations has maintained a reputation for lawlessness as well. It is also described as "the end of the road, the last outpost for an American original.” Among these Americans originals are a wide array of writers: Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane and Hunter S. Thompson, as well as musician Jimmy Buffett, whose music set the tone for the town. What begins as a biography of a place soon branches off into mini-biographies of its residents. McKeen holds his gaze longest on McGuane, described as "the most revered writer of his generation.” Yet soon after his arrival, even McGuane became afflicted with the vices of the island, engaging in the excesses of boozing and womanizing that became a trademark for many of the island's better-known inhabitants. "Lust was a legacy of island life,” writes McKeen, a statement McGuane seemed to set out to prove. Equally engaging is the story of Buffett's miraculous rise from "scruffy street singer" to beloved entertainer. Much of his stardom was attributed to his hit single, "Margaritaville," which “bottled up the essence of Key West in an effervescent, maddeningly memorable pop song.” By the end of the book, McKeen also offers his own take on capturing the essence of the place: “Key West is still Key West"—a statement that, while cryptic, seems to somehow say it all. An engrossing tell-all in which Key West's most notable residents struggle to find sanity, sobriety and a place to call home.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59200-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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