Fitting somewhere between the stories of Lawrence of Arabia and Anna and the king of Siam, this is nicely recounted by the Jewish carpenter's daughter and son-in-law, bracketed by their own pertinent observations. Actually, Mendel Cohen was more than a simple carpenter. He was a contractor to the king. Abdullah, the only Arab chief known to have talked directly with Israeli leaders, was the first ruler of Transjordan (as it was then known), an entity created shortly before the birth of Israel. Cohen, a native of Jerusalem and fluent in Arabic, was hired in 1937 by then-Emir Abdullah to refurbish his palace in Amman. Work led to friendship, and Cohen soon became familiar with the royal household and the inevitable court intrigue. Portraits of Abdullah's sons, the slow Naif and the explosive Talal (father of Jordan's present king, Hussein), the noble characters, and the wily courtiers are all drawn neatly. The stories related here range from the operation of the harem to feasts in the emir's tent, where an entire roasted camel was not an unusual entree. More than a royal backstairs exposÇ, this is a thoughtful text, respectful of Arab ways and the teachings of Islam as well as the lessons of the writers' own heritage. Biblical history is felt as a current presence. The forces of enmity that finally separated Cohen and the king (in 1948, Cohen fought in the Israel Defense Force against the Arab forces commanded by Abdullah) have not abated, yet years later, visiting Amman at the invitation of Hussein, Cohen's daughter found reason in her father's experiences to hope for peace. An engaging story and a vision of friendship, seen perhaps through rose-tinted glasses, but nevertheless a rare upbeat view in a particularly dim season for Mideast peace. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55970-391-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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