The first official biography of Giuseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa and author of The Leopard, recounted by British journalist (and family friend) Gilmour with an elegance and precision worthy of his subject. When The Leopard was published in 1958 to great acclaim, Lampedusa was already one year dead and entirely unknown as a writer. Intensely shy and self-contained, he did not even begin writing until late in life and left the world no picture of himself save that contained in his portrait of Don Fabrizio, the doomed aristocrat of his novel, whose declining fortunes mirrored that of the Lampedusa family. The last scion of a long line of Sicilian nobility, Lampedusa grew up in a world that had little use—and no role—for him, and he found his only refuge from the tedium of daily life in literature: A voracious reader, he was capable of working his way through entire novels at a single sitting. Ill at ease among intellectuals, Lampedusa made little use of his literary interests until—well into middle age—he began to give informal lectures on English poetry and prose to a small circle of friends. Gradually he formed the notion of writing a novel that would ``preserve'' the nearly vanished world of Sicily's ancien rÇgime, much as the works of Dickens had captured 19th-century London. With marvelous insight and clarity (aided by an unimpeded access to Lampedusa's notes and papers), Gilmour traces the process by which the aging prince came to an understanding of his own history and managed to transform what he himself saw as ``a largely wasted life'' into one of the most controversial and admired novels of the century. A fascinating chronicle: Gilmour writes with the assurance of a seasoned scholar and the ease of a born storyteller.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40183-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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
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
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