Heartfelt and most effective when the author’s lens moves from herself to the events beyond her.
Continuing a tale echoed fictionally in her When the Cypress Whispers (2014), Emmy Award–winning writer and producer Corporon relates a story of compassion and collective resistance during World War II, linking it to contemporary events.
A small island near the larger Adriatic island of Corfu, Erikousa served as an unlikely refuge when, as Allied forces advanced, the Nazis rounded up Corfu’s Jewish population and sent them by boat and train to Auschwitz. Perhaps 1 in 10 Jews survived, and that thanks to Christians who hid them away—often in plain sight, telling Jewish children to answer to Christian names: “From now on, your name is Nikos. Do you understand?” said one of the rescuers. “If the soldiers hear the name Daniel, they will know you are Jewish, and they will take you from us.” In a place marked by the old blood libels and ethnic uneasiness, the act was nothing short of heroic. When the Allied soldiers finally arrived later in 1944, many of the remaining Jews began to disperse, finding homes in Palestine and other lands. It took the author years to connect her grandmother’s occasional reminiscences with these larger events, and when, as an adult, she finally did, she began to retrace them, traveling to places such as Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, as well as Erikousa. Corporon’s account can be a little by-the-numbers, a little too self-directed, and a little overly sentimental (“we hugged and we cried in a jumble of English, Greek, and Hebrew, but we understood each other perfectly”), but there is undeniable emotional power in the connections her story helps forge between the living and the dead, some of whom might be otherwise forgotten. The narrative gathers extra force when the author’s nephew is killed by an anti-Semitic gunman in a well-publicized attack in America, prompting her to wonder how removed the Nazi past really is from our own time.
Heartfelt and most effective when the author’s lens moves from herself to the events beyond her.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6111-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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