It is hard to imagine that Samuel, as a boy, struggled to translate “Hast Du genug fur Heute?” (“Do you have enough food for...
First-time memoirist Samuel tells the story of life after WWII.
The author’s father was a Luftwaffe officer during the war. As the Reich begins to collapse in 1945, ten-year-old Samuel, his mother, and his sister flee Germany, making a terrifying and pitiful home for themselves in refugee camps. Eventually the family returns to Strasbourg, where Samuel begins to come to grips with two evils: the Nazi regime that ruled during the war, and the Communist apparat he now has to contend with. Later on his family moves to America, and (as we learn in the epilogue) Samuel goes on to serve in the US Air Force for three decades. The descriptions of the horrors of war and its aftermath are a touch too predictable to hold the reader’s attention, but Samuel’s portrait of life in Germany (especially in the innocent days before the Reich crumbled) are lovely and evocative and manage to humanize German civilians under Hitler. Especially moving are Samuel’s descriptions of his grandparents, Oma and Opa Samuel. They were the one sure source of love in young Samuel’s life—his mother never had a kind word for him, and she often pummeled him with a rug beater or locked him in a broom closet for hours on end. Oma is a font of wise aphorisms, however, and Opa subtly teaches Samuel to resist the Reich (instructing him to greet people with “Guten Morgen” instead of “Heil Hitler”). “My grandparents’ house was full of mysteries,” Samuel writes, as he goes on to describe his exploits in the Green Room (so-called for its thick, verdant velvet) and his first taste of liquor at his Opa’s knee.
It is hard to imagine that Samuel, as a boy, struggled to translate “Hast Du genug fur Heute?” (“Do you have enough food for today?”) into English—for now his prose sings (or, at least, whistles and hums some lovely tunes).Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57806-274-8
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
