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THE ART OF INVENTING HOPE

Name: THE ART OF INVENTING HOPE
Author: Howard Reich
ISBN: 978-1-64160-134-4

INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS WITH ELIE WIESEL

by Howard Reich ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2019

Irreplaceable thoughts from a vanishing generation.

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A collection of final timeless reflections from Elie Wiesel (1928-2016).

Chicago Tribune veteran Reich (Portraits in Jazz: 80 Profiles of Jazz Legends, Renegades and Revolutionaries, 2014, etc.), whose parents were survivors of the Holocaust, looks back on his greatest opportunity as a writer and journalist: numerous conversations with the Nobel laureate. This brief but moving work artfully intertwines Wiesel’s words of wisdom with Reich’s quest to further understand his own family’s untold story. The author recalls a youth colored by his parents’ trauma and yet lived in silence, as their experiences during the Holocaust were utterly unspoken topics. Only later in life, when Reich’s father was dead and his mother was struggling with the delusional effects of PTSD, was he able to fully understand their stories. His fortuitous friendship with Wiesel helped him in this quest. In many ways, Reich’s book is a reflection on the lives of the children of Holocaust survivors rather than the survivors themselves. This generation, raised in the shadow of the Holocaust but often without a clear picture of what it really meant for their parents, carries its own particular burden. It is a burden Reich feels keenly and which Wiesel fully appreciated. Beyond calling on the children to do away with feelings of guilt, Wiesel embraces their worth: “To be a child of survivors is to be miraculous. What had to be done for a child to be born! For the survivors to overcome fear.” In their conversations, Reich and Wiesel cover many topics, including anti-Semitism, Israel, forgiveness, and faith. Wiesel’s mindset is almost universally positive, and he never judges the conclusions of other survivors, consistently choosing a path of hope and compassion. Reich does an admirable job of complementing his subject’s sage words with his own perspective without in any way detracting or distracting from it—no easy task yet one the author accomplishes with aplomb.

Irreplaceable thoughts from a vanishing generation.

Pub Date: May 7, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-64160-134-4

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
JELLY’S BLUES
by Howard Reich & William Gaines

- BOOK REVIEW
VAN CLIBURN
by Howard Reich

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.