by Marjorie Agosín (1997)
"In Osorno, Chile, the Nazis were the great feudal lords of the south and being Jewish was like possessing a savage and dangerous scar." The author thus describes the backdrop for this memoir of growing up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants to Chile in the years before and after World War II. Speaking through the voice of her mother, she says, "I write these sometimes intermittent and true memories with the voice of an adolescent and then of a woman. . . . I wish to talk about my life in an unseemly and noisy house in southern Chile and about a town with fifty Nazis and three Jewish families. Everything I tell you is true and this is why I write so that it will be even more certain." This beautifully written story offers glimpses of cultures and landscapes little known outside of Chile. The narrative weaves back and forth through time offering the stories of the narrator's family: her father who had to leave Vienna around 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer, her paternal grandmother who came to Chile in 1939 with a number tattooed on her arm, her mother's family from Odessa, and numerous aunts and uncles. The narrator returns to Osorno in 1993 and notes how little has changed. The Germans still display portraits of Hitler in their homes and sell Hitler memorabilia.
John Gross
The author is the son of a Jewish doctor who practiced in the East End of London from the 1920s to World War II and beyond. His parents were the children of immigrants, steeped in Eastern European customs, yet outside the home he grew up in a very English world of comics and corner shops, sandbags and bomb sites, battered school desks and addictive, dusty movie houses.
Steve Sem-Sandberg
Follows the World War II tale of Jewish ghetto director Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who in an ambitious effort to render the ghetto an invaluable industrial complex makes compromises that have extraordinary consequences.
Jerry Weist
"Bradbury: An Illustrated Life features magazine illustrations, movie stills and posters, comic book art, letters, scripts, book jackets, and paintings - all expertly selected and insightfully explained - that trace an incomparable artist's journey through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Here also are rare and illuminating gems from some of his renowned compatriots and collaborators, including excerpts from the journal of legendary director Francois Truffaut, written during the making of the motion picture version of Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451."--BOOK JACKET.
Douglas Kinnard
"Dwight David Eisenhower proudly claimed that he "came from the very heart of America." Yet it could be argued that despite those provincial beginnings, no other American exerted more influence on world history during the twentieth century. From his humble youth in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower rose to the supreme command of the Allied armies that helped destroy Adolf Hitler's Nazi war machine and to the presidency of the United States. Douglas Kinnard's profile of this great soldier-statesman describes his rise through the ranks of the peacetime Army of the 1920s and 1930s, recognition of his abilities by such leaders as Douglas MacArthur and George C. Marshall, his "great crusade" in Europe during World War II, and his two terms in the Oval Office. Dr. Kinnard's penetrating look at this great military leader and commander in chief serves as an introduction to Eisenhower's life and provides a concise account of the momentous military and political events of the first half of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.