Despite the gossipy bits, the research is impressive, and Sebba offers balance to the plethora of war histories featuring...
An extensively researched cultural history of Paris from 1939 to 1949, covering events leading to the fall of Paris, its occupation by the Nazis, and the early postwar years.
Journalist Sebba (That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, 2012, etc.), a former Reuters foreign correspondent, pored over memoirs, diaries, and letters, read books, watched films, handled artifacts, and interviewed women who lived through the events to understand how the war changed the lives of Parisiennes and how they adjusted to loss, fear, and hunger under occupation. Women were forced to make difficult choices, and the author convincingly demonstrates that this was a complicated business, that their options were limited as they struggled to live alongside their male Nazi occupiers and care for their families in the absence of men, many of whom were serving overseas or were prisoners of war. The stories show the good and bad sides of human nature as women resisted, suffered, and died or collaborated and flourished. In postwar Paris, female collaborators were publicly shamed, but the work of women resistors often went unrecognized because they were not part of an official organization. Sebba brings their stories to light and also highlights women who made less-than-honorable compromises. She seems to have a fondness for the socially prominent, making her vulnerable to the charge of name-dropping, and she gratuitously brings in big names in the fashion world—e.g., Christian Dior gets space because his sister was a member of the resistance. Since the book is divided into chapters that cover one year, individuals whose stories begin in an early year may not appear again for several years, making their narratives hard to follow. The back-of-the book list of the cast of characters is an essential guide for befuddled readers.
Despite the gossipy bits, the research is impressive, and Sebba offers balance to the plethora of war histories featuring the roles of men. The book has ample material for lively discussion in women’s studies classes.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-04859-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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