Predictable, even trite.
Attorney and architect Lee’s meandering memoir about growing up in an immigrant family.
First-time author Lee opens with his mother’s story, charting her move from a traditional Toisanese village to San Francisco. His descriptions of his mother’s early life understandably feel a bit removed, and the pace picks up when Lee turns to his own childhood and adolescence. He was born in the U.S. and, as a teenager in the late 1960s, sporadically participated in politics. At Berkeley, Lee grappled with class lines in the Asian-American community—middle-class Asians didn’t invite working-class kids like him to their parties. In 1972, Lee’s brother Richard was implicated in the slaying of another man. Richard was eventually convicted of first-degree murder, although Lee suspected his brother was in fact the victim of a “well-orchestrated conspiracy.” The last quarter of the book recounts Lee’s dogged efforts to rescue his bother. He raised funds for Richard’s appeal, and even entered law school because he thought acquainting himself with the legal system might somehow help. The question of identity looms large in this plodding family narrative: What makes an American? How do Americans connect with their ancestral past? Traveling to Toisan in 1983 was the beginning of what Lee describes as “a slow reintegration of self.” As a first-generation American, he had always felt “as if I had been dropped out of the sky,” as if his American present and future had nothing to do with his parents’ past. The trip to Toisan helped bridge the gap. Lee’s prose is uninspired, and sometimes embarrassingly juvenile (a high school “Song and Yell” contest was “an orgasm of school spirit”). Throughout, the author weaves his mother’s own words, set off in italics; unfortunately, this seems gimmicky, and the constant veering from one voice to another is irksome rather than powerful.
Predictable, even trite.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 1-59486-456-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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