Grim, sobering tales fashioned by a terrific writer brave enough to unearth the real story.
Exciting, heart-wrenching dispatches among the poor and disenfranchised of Haiti and Latin America.
Instead of embarking on a meditation retreat, Hadden suddenly got a dream job offer from NPR and was sent first to Mexico City, just as Vicente Fox was gaining election as president in 2000, then to Haiti, where pro– and anti–Jean-Bertrand Aristide factions were threatening to derail an important election. In succinct, polished chapters, the author recounts his attempts to cover the action, interviewing Fox and watching over time the unraveling of his promised “guest worker” programs sanctioned by the United States. Gradually, Hadden gleaned the more complicated, real story, involving corruption, drug smuggling and waves of perilous human migration to the north. To cover America’s war on drugs, the author dragged a terrified “fixer” with him on a dangerous expedition through the Darien Gap separating Panama from Colombia, through which shipments of guns passed—literally the same guns the U.S. had paid for (“same defects, same serial numbers, different fingers on the triggers”) to conduct previous Central American conflicts. American indifference and inattention both to Latin America and Haiti had sown deep poverty and resentment in the respective regions, and 9/11 did not soften feelings against their untrustworthy neighbor to the north. In Haiti, Hadden attended a ghastly all-night Voodoo ceremony intended to help get Aristide elected, and visited the Duvalier dictators’ former prison on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where children pranced on the beach and gleefully showed the author human bones that remained from the time of abundant executions. While Hadden was chasing stories for the radio, he also lived in a haunted house in Mexico City, helped a Guatemalan fixer through personal trauma and fell in love with a young married French woman.
Grim, sobering tales fashioned by a terrific writer brave enough to unearth the real story.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202007-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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