Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.
O’Donnell, a former political correspondent at Bloomberg, debuts with a wrenching family story that spreads across much of the landscape of World War II.
The principal figure in the story is Inge, the author’s grandmother, who died in 2017; throughout the author’s youth, Inge was reticent, even secretive, about her experiences during the war. “Silence has always dominated women’s experience of war,” writes the author. Inge’s experiences, she writes, comprise “a story of love and family, of a girl from a vanished land who lived through a time when Europe, and its humanity, collapsed.” Inge and her family lived comfortably in the Prussian town of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) near the Baltic Sea. The author follows the family—and some of their acquaintances and intimates—through the war and after, chronicling the many horrors they experienced, including displacement, poverty, violence, and, finally, their eventual restoration. O’Donnell’s narrative technique is engaging. She intercuts her family’s experiences with her own as she relentlessly pursued their stories. She traveled to all the key sites, interviewed relatives and scholars, and dug through libraries and archives, including her own family’s. “There’s something about physically seeing places that drives home the reality of the past,” she writes. O’Donnell’s many discoveries included letters, photographs (many of which she includes with the text), and records of all sorts. Gradually, Inge opened up about her past, and we learn that it has some dark corners. Her youthful lover impregnated her, but his father would not permit a marriage, so he left her and went off to war. O’Donnell also discovered a number of key elements of Inge’s history after her death. The author, a graceful, eloquent writer, follows a trail that sometimes takes her through deeply troubling terrain, and she amply reveals the cruelty and compassion that characterize times of war.
Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-8021-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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