A feebly written profile in courage. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
A Jewish nurse recalls her myriad adventures in WWII as a spy operating under the noses of the Nazis.
Cohn, who grew up in French Lorraine but spoke German fluently, begins in 1945. Posing as a German nurse, she is about to slip into enemy territory as an intelligence agent. She ends the first chapter with Nazis pointing weapons at her, then invites us to wait as she fills in the intervening autobiographical detail. Born in 1920, Cohn experienced the Holocaust firsthand. Like many others, she and her family found themselves gradually isolated, then singled out for arrest and deportation. (A sister died at Auschwitz; her lover was executed for his resistance activities.) A determined young woman whose features the Nazis did not consider “Jewish,” Cohn was able to acquire some nurse’s training. When Paris was liberated, she joined the French army and by January 1945 was working undercover. She went on a number of dangerous missions (principally to detect enemy troop locations) and after the war returned to nursing, including a stint in Indochina. She eventually married, raised a family, moved to California. If all is to be believed, Cohn was a remarkable woman: she chastised Nazis to their faces, intimidated the prisoners she interrogated, learned to drive a stick-shift in one hour, possessed a photographic memory, verbally chastened a would-be rapist so severely that he not only abandoned his assault but offered to marry her, attracted the amorous attentions of most of the men she met, was a crack shot, survived falls through the ice, bullets, tanks, and traitors. Meanwhile, the prose—with an assist from novelist Holden (Farm Fatale, 2002, etc.)—is not worthy of the subject. Bristling with clichés, the text features long passages of humdrum dialogue (recalled verbatim from a half-century ago?) and has all the stylistic sophistication of a YA novel.
A feebly written profile in courage. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-61054-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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