An essential companion to the original novel.
Keneally (A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia, 2006, etc.) chronicles the conception, birth and rich afterlife of his most celebrated work.
The Australian author is a genial, unaffected companion in this leisurely voyage around Schindler’s List (1982), which began with a broken briefcase in California. Stopping in a leather-goods store in 1980, Keneally met proprietor Leopold Pfefferberg, who always insisted the author call him Poldek. Learning that his customer was a writer, Poldek told Keneally about Oskar Schindler, who had saved both him and his wife during the Holocaust. He insisted that this story would win Keneally the Nobel Prize and any filmmaker an Oscar. (So far, he has proved half-right.) The author reveals that he was initially reluctant to take on the project, being a non-Jew and a non-European who knew only the basics about World War II, but notes that Poldek insisted these were virtues. Soon, Keneally was caught up in the story, interviewing Holocaust survivors and traveling to Poland to see the remains of the Warsaw ghetto, the camps at Auschwitz and myriad relevant sites. He was intrigued by the moral ambiguity embodied by Schindler, who saved many Jews but also profited from the labor of enslaved people and had, to put it mildly, a relaxed sexual code. Keneally chronicles the publication of the book, which indeed became the bestseller Poldek fiercely believed it would be. In prose so clear it glistens, he describes working on early drafts of the screenplay with Steven Spielberg (who eventually, gently, fired him) and the production of the film, much of which he observed. President Clinton attended the 1993 premiere, and the movie won seven Academy Awards. Keneally’s narrative ends sadly, with the deaths of his father and Poldek.
An essential companion to the original novel.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52617-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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