Queer history and Holocaust history converge in this remarkable account.
A “passionate friendship” shared by two women imprisoned in a concentration camp.
Grete Buber-Neumann, a German communist, was sent to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women, in 1940. Milena Jesenská, from a wealthy family in Prague, arrived two months later. The camp's inmates were organized in a caste system, with so-called “asocials”—prostitutes, lesbians, Roma—at the bottom. But as relatively privileged prisoners—Grete a “block elder,” Milena an office secretary—both had a “clear view of the sinister Nazi machinations” afoot. Strauss knows that her subjects would not have identified as lesbians, but their loving relationship was nonetheless instrumental in “defeating the unbearable reality” of a wretched life in a slave-labor turned death camp. Their lives are well explored. Milena, a political journalist who played an important part in the Czech resistance to Nazi occupation, was an intimate of and correspondent with Franz Kafka and is now acknowledged as his first translator. Grete, a survivor of the Soviet gulag, wrote the postwar memoir Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (1948), “compelled by her promise to Milena to ‘bear witness to the tragedy of my generation.’” Milena died at Ravensbrück in 1944; Greta was released in 1945 and died in 1989. All of the camp's records were burned up before its liberation by the Red Army, so the lives of these two brave women have been all but “erased from history.” But Strauss’ research into and reimagining of their four years together amount to an essential rediscovery of this history. Her work is as alert to the tenderness of their connection as to the immense evil of their surroundings.
Queer history and Holocaust history converge in this remarkable account.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781250285744
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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