A rare, vivid perspective on the impact of war.
Letters from a young Londoner to her lover offer an intimate chronicle of life on the homefront.
In 2017, McGowan purchased a large cache of letters written by Eileen Alexander (1917-1986), from 1939 to 1947, to Gershon Ellenbogen, her boyfriend, fiance, and, in 1944, husband. Deftly edited by McGowan and with informative chapter introductions by Crane, the letters offer a moving, sharply etched chronicle of wartime London, where Eileen lived with her family, joined the war effort, and eagerly awaited Gershon’s return from a post in Egypt. As Alexander herself noted, she was a lively, engaging correspondent: “letter-writing is undoubtedly my medium,” she wrote to Gershon; “when I’m writing (and particularly when I’m writing to you, my dear love) I have the feeling that I’m living my experiences all over again—but living them more richly, because they’re being shared with a friend.” Alexander’s wit and intelligence shine through reports of her work, their friends’ romantic entanglements, her reflections on religion, her sexual longing, and tidbits of gossip, some related to their mutual friend Aubrey Eban, who later became, as Abba Eban, the internationally renowned “Voice of Israel.” Awarded a first in English at Cambridge, Alexander laces her letters with literary references, and though nightly bombings often required sleeping in shelters, she and her friends were able to dine out, gather in one another’s houses, and attend the theater and movies, excursions that she recounted in detail to Gershon. The war certainly took its toll, psychologically and emotionally, but Alexander assured Gershon, “I’m a Girl of Simple Needs. The only things I must have are you,” friends, books, and “constant Hot Water.” As “depressing and exhausting” as the war was, Alexander wrote, “if I were asked to choose between death and a shameful peace—I would choose death,” she wrote. “The only price I couldn’t pay would be your life.”
A rare, vivid perspective on the impact of war.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-288880-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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