Either way, This I Believe is full of pleasures. Whatever their setting, the most memorable of these pieces ably show why...
An autumn-of-life exercise in taking stock by the renowned Mexican novelist and essayist (Inez, 2002, etc.).
“I believe in Balzac,” writes Fuentes. “Next to Cervantes and Faulkner, he is the novelist who has influenced me the most.” Fuentes avows belief in many other things, too: in at least a modicum of essential goodness in Homo sapiens; in Shakespeare and Faulkner; in love that, because mature and real and all-embracing, also contains some element of evil; in the “warm breasts of the girls in Boulder, Colorado”; in the possibility of his fellow Mexicans one day casting aside the “legend of the defeated” and taking their rightful place in the world (after all, Mexico is five times the size of France); in friendship, although all friendships are doomed to end one day; and in sundry odd other matters. Anyone who has kept up with Fuentes’s work over the last five decades will find some expected notes: a love verging on worship of other writers, most memorably expressed in passages on encountering Thomas Mann in Zurich; a conviction that reason will one day point the way toward our getting out of the various messes that we get ourselves into. But there are surprises here, too, and even a few puzzles: a head-scratching moment when Fuentes recalls holding an infant daughter, another where he propagates a novel view of one particularly well-known figure in history (“Jesus does not resurrect the dead. He revives the living. Jesus is the copy editor of human life”). All these opinions, centripetal and centrifugal, are developed to greater or lesser degrees: sometimes Fuentes turns in whole essays, crisply written and self-contained, in defense of one thesis or another; at other times he offers up crystalline apothegms surrounded by not much of anything in particular.
Either way, This I Believe is full of pleasures. Whatever their setting, the most memorable of these pieces ably show why Fuentes has been so well regarded all these years.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6246-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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