Capable rendition of an elaborate family drama.
British author Stuart debuts with a saga of transatlantic maneuvers worthy of Henry James or Edith Wharton.
Alva Smith bolstered the flagging fortunes of her Southern, formerly slave-owning family in 1875 by marrying William K. Vanderbilt, son of the fabulously wealthy but not socially acceptable Commodore. The Vanderbilts had made progress in getting into Mrs. Astor’s good graces when William’s philandering prompted a scandalous divorce in 1895. There was no way daughter Consuelo could be allowed to enjoy true love with a respectable New Englander; Alva steered her into the arms of the Duke of Marlborough. A contemporary newspaper reported that the Vanderbilts paid $10,000,000 in order to join their family to the Marlborough line, and the duke certainly needed the cash: The same paper reported that he earned the 1895 equivalent of $40,000, but his palace at Blenheim cost $370,000 to maintain. Consuelo was none too pleased with the arrangement, in which she had no say; small wonder that she kept her groom waiting at the altar while she wept in the arms of her father, who had no choice but to persuade her to get it over with. Consuelo did, and Alva was soon reaping the benefits due the mother of the Duchess of Marlborough. Good thing, for she needed points to reenter society after her divorce. Declaring that she would never again be financially dependent on a man (save for alimony, of course), Alva later became a strong advocate of women’s rights—some said in penance for what she had done to Consuelo, separated from the duke in 1906 but not divorced until 1921, when she quickly remarried and found happiness among the nobility of France.
Capable rendition of an elaborate family drama.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-621418-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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