A well-observed, heartbreaking memoir of the Holocaust.
In her debut memoir, Roth recounts her experiences as a Jewish teenager in Poland during the Holocaust.
The author spent her childhood in comfort in interwar Poland, where her father was the editor of a Jewish newspaper and her mother was a clothing store owner. When Nazi Germany attacked the country in 1939, German soldiers forced Roth’s family, along with the rest of the city’s Jewish population, into a ghetto, where they faced starvation, disease, and brutal violence. Roth’s father managed to escape to Palestine, but she and the rest of her family remained trapped. Ultimately, Roth’s mother, her three siblings, and many members of her extended family were murdered by the Nazis. Roth’s experiences are sadly similar to many others’, but her eye for detail and intimate writing style provide readers with a full, personal, and unique view of a tragic time. Particularly illuminating are her accounts of daily life during her three years in the ghetto. Along with the more widely known historical details, there are surprising anecdotes of Jewish peddlers making their living selling the required Star of David armbands or of a young violin virtuoso’s performance, which temporarily released Roth and her friend from thoughts of fear and hunger. Roth writes in the present tense with great specificity, which adds immediacy to the events. Despite knowing the outcome, readers won’t be able to help but feel inspired by the “revival of the spirit” that spread through the Jewish community prior to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After that rebellion was suppressed, Roth passed through what she calls “the gates of hell” and was sent to the Majdanek concentration camp, then to Auschwitz and, later, Bergen-Belsen. Roth depicts the horrors she experienced in these places with clarity and urgency, which will give readers the feeling that the events are unfolding before their eyes, not in some distant period of history. For this reason, Roth’s book is a necessary volume.
A well-observed, heartbreaking memoir of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484125106
Page Count: 422
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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