An absorbing true story of sexual intrigue, legal battles, filial piety, and social history in 16th-century Germany. Ozment (History/Harvard, Protestants, 1992) recreates the fascinating confrontation between a respected bÅrgermeister and his free-spirited daughter. Hermann BÅschler was a wealthy councilman in the southern German city of Schwabisch Hall. His daughter Anna provoked his wrath and that of the town with her flirtatious and scandalous behavior; in particular, she juggled affairs with two men, one a Jew. When her father discovered Anna's cache of love letters, he resolved to disown her. Anna, in turn, charged that her father was negligent in contracting a proper marriage for her and insisted on claiming her inheritance. So began a battle that lasted over 25 years. The tale unfolds within the context of a Germany driven by the Protestant Reformation, recovering from periodic recurrences of the Black Death, and struggling to confront the overwhelming issues of the early modern age. Ozment, utilizing Anna's love letters and surviving court documents, weaves a complex human story of the woman, her lovers, and her family. No less important as characters are the townspeople, who see Anna as transgressing time-honored norms of filial and sexual behavior. Successfully disowned by her father, an outcast in the community, Anna spent the remainder of her life in a fruitless effort to recover her inhertitance. Ozment clearly examines how Anna's case reflects issues of class and gender, and concludes that ``in that distant age, as in our own, rationality and madness accompanied one another, the one as prominent and real as the other.'' Less convincingly, the author argues that Anna's story reveals that women were not ``powerless victims of male rule,'' but able to define themselves and ``leave their mark on history.'' Undoubtedly, though, the situation of women was more complex than previously thought, and this riveting drama of an ambiguous heroine sheds light on that bygone age. (illustrations, not seen) (History Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: March 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13939-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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