A gripping, harrowing account of suffering and hard-won humanity.
A man survives the Holocaust with only his art to sustain him in this biography.
Richardson tells the story of Sam Herciger, a Polish Jew born in 1917 who became an artist and gallery owner in Israel before his death in 1981, and his passage through history’s worst horrors. After an idyllic small-town boyhood and apprenticeship as a furrier, he got caught up in the antisemitism and tyranny sweeping Europe in the 1930s. A socialist at the age of 17, he crossed the border into the Soviet Union hoping to get free training in art from the workers’ state only to be arrested as a spy, beaten, and sent back to Poland. There, he was promptly arrested as a Soviet spy and tortured with electric shocks. He then traveled through Nazi Germany, dodging a German border guard’s bullets, and lived in Belgium for years, studying at an art academy, plying the furrier’s trade, and marrying. His luck ran out in 1944 during World War II when he and his wife, Hennie, were caught by the Gestapo. They were sent to Auschwitz, where Herciger was separated from Hennie and never saw her again. He plunged into a hell of backbreaking labor, starvation rations, beatings, and the threat of random killings by SS guards. He was death-marched to an Austrian slave-labor camp and got more of the same until the war’s end. Adrift—his family had been killed by the Germans—he slowly emerged from despair through painting and sculpture, which brought him growing acclaim and another chance at love. Richardson bases this searing biography on Herciger’s notes and includes informative chapters on the historical background along with reproductions of the artist’s paintings, which feature haunting, black-and-white renderings of skeletal prisoners. Her novelistic prose starkly conveys the surreal cruelty Herciger endured—“The heavy club was landing on different parts of his body, with all the force of the pig-man behind it….While he was enduring this punishment, the officer was eating chocolate”—but also finds a heartbreaking lyricism in the darkness, as at his parting with Hennie. (“Her blonde hair and pale face stood out luminously in the bleak light…as the distance between them increased.”) The result is a nightmarish yet ultimately hopeful portrait of spiritual survival in the most terrifying circumstances.
A gripping, harrowing account of suffering and hard-won humanity.Pub Date: April 28, 2022
ISBN: 9789493276123
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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