Veers confusingly from the predictable to the deliberately outrageous.
English society as dissected by a young French writer based in London.
Poirier expands on the Frenchwoman’s-eye-view premise of her regular column for the Guardian, getting off to an interesting start by criticizing the vapid politics of British and French teenagers: “today’s protest has turned into another capitalist enterprise.” However, subsequent musings prove to be much less thought provoking, with the author quickly descending into all-too-predictable tracts about Britain’s relationship with America, the English propensity for apologizing, the failings of the English film industry and the difference between English and French sexual proclivities. A few passages offer a soupçon of original thought—Poirier finds the English obsession with pets unusual and lays into animal-rights activism—but it’s often difficult to figure out whether she’s trying to raise a serious point or simply being “overtly French and provocative.” Addressing the common accusation that the French are too serious, she writes, “seriousness is not boring; it is existential.” Is this intended as humor, provocation or a simple statement of opinion? Poirier’s prose doesn’t really convey which of these applies. Readers may guess it’s the author’s actual belief, since the overriding emotion expressed here is love for her homeland. In the author’s estimation, France can barely put a foot wrong, and she lavishes praise on some very esoteric aspects of her native culture; at one point, she declares her preference for the rudeness of Gallic shopkeepers over the polite service she receives the U.K. Though she asserts that this text was written “in the English language, for an English readership,” it may well prove baffling to non-French eyes.
Veers confusingly from the predictable to the deliberately outrageous.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-297-85234-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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