A memoir of unbearable honesty about a German woman reckoning with war, family, and forgiveness.
Wartime wounds.
Coenen, a German-born American botanist, has written an arresting collection of essays on what it means to live with political guilt, social trauma, and the unspoken memories not just of what Germany did in World War II, but of what was done to Germany during the conflict. The firebombing of German cities has remained the open wound in Allied history. Coenen develops the insights of the author W.G. Sebald, who understood that postwar German life and literature had to find ways of processing the pain of air war against it—the sense that thousands were erased and displaced by a force that no one saw, that came from skies no one could see. This memory shaped Coenen’s family life, and it shapes her relationship to German heritage and language. Moving to America for graduate work, teaching at a college in rural Pennsylvania, the author finds herself living in English but “processing emotions…in German through these years.” To write in English, she states, “felt like a betrayal.” And yet, she must tell her tale in her adopted tongue. That tale concerns the lives of her family during the 1940s—displacement, fear, and a childhood among ruins. Hunger was everywhere. Written with the scientist’s eye for detail, these essays ask questions that few may wish to answer: What was ordinary life like for Germans of the 1940s? How does an individual recover from the loss of a society? Can the pain of a family be inherited? How does the author cope with knowing that her grandfather, as a young man, voted for Adolf Hitler? “The scientist in me pores over…data,” she says. But the writer in her recognizes that sometimes you must come to terms with stories that cannot be pegged into a graph or spreadsheet.
A memoir of unbearable honesty about a German woman reckoning with war, family, and forgiveness.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781632064059
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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