Just serviceable. Readers interested in all things Amis will want to refer to the roman à clef The Information and anxiously...
Indifferently written bio of “the best prose stylist in English…in the closing decades of the last and the opening of this century.”
Martin Amis is, of course, the famed one-time bad boy of British letters, son of Kingsley, the leader of the sort-of school of British writers numbering the likes of Ian Hamilton, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Clive James and Christopher Hitchens—not a woman in the lot and for reasons that a survivor of the 1970s will probably understand. (Men did not become enlightened until later, if then.) Bradford (English/Univ. of Ulster; Poetry: The Ultimate Guide, 2010, etc.) does a yeomanlike job of wrestling this Amis to the ground, and though an academic, he is sensible enough to realize that readers will want not just the 411 on the making of, say, Dead Babies and London Fields, but the really juicy stuff: the famous (or infamous) split with his former literary agent for an American counterpart dubbed “the Jackal,” his contemporaneous exchange of a long-suffering wife for a younger and more exotic one, his expensive dental work, etc.—in short, all the gossipy items that Amis may, regrettably, be better known for than for his actual work. Bradford’s book comes alive when he shifts from life to that work, as when he writes that Amis’ middle-period novels are “exceptional partly because of their intransigent refusal to conform to the predominant tenor of his own fiction or to discernible precedents elsewhere.” The biographical material, on the other hand, is humdrum, rendered in a commaless and sometimes breathless British English that isn’t always revealing.
Just serviceable. Readers interested in all things Amis will want to refer to the roman à clef The Information and anxiously await an autobiography.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-385-1
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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