Inconsequential but pleasant. For meatier treatments, see Jean Edward Smith’s Grant (2001) and, more recently, Josiah...
Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?
Apart from Ulysses and Julia, a vast library of biographies and historical studies devoted to the great Civil War general. To them comes this slender volume, inaugurating James Atlas’s Eminent Lives series, by noted memoirist/novelist/editor/bon vivant Korda (Horse People, 2003, etc.). Korda adds nothing whatever to the scholarship, but he has an evident and immediate sympathy for his subject, who, of course, is remembered just as much for his persistent alcoholism as for his victories at places like Vicksburg and Fort Donelson, just as much for the scandals that marred his presidency as for the efforts he made to effect the Reconstruction. Korda praises Grant’s virtues—“his reserve, his quiet determination, his courage in the face of adversity,” all of which came into play when the general was dying of cancer and racing against the clock to finish his famed memoirs, now much in the news as a contrast to those of Bill Clinton. He also offers a couple of wrinkles that might give other students of Grant pause: Korda sees Grant as, well, a touchy fellow, where other biographers have been amazed at the thickness of his hide; Korda breezily hints that Grant prized the presidency because he got to eat turkey at the White House every day, where other biographers pass that matter by. Korda is a charming and learned writer, as always. But, as wide-ranging as his cultural references are, he’s shaky on certain facts: Beyoncé is not a teenager; the term “hooker” is not an invention of the Civil War; and so forth. Such errors can undermine his authority, which is tenuous in the matter of Grant in the first place, especially now that so many historians have turned their attention to the general.
Inconsequential but pleasant. For meatier treatments, see Jean Edward Smith’s Grant (2001) and, more recently, Josiah Bunting’s brief life of the general and president (p. 612).Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-059015-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
