A vital historical document.
A member of the French Resistance recalls her work against the Nazis, capture and imprisonment during World War II.
Originally published in 1946, the book has taken a surprisingly long time to be translated into English, especially since scholars frequently cite it as an important source of information about the Resistance, notable for its accuracy and immediacy. Humbert (1894–1963), an art historian, wrote the bulk of the text in the nine months immediately after her liberation from a German labor camp; three chapters are directly transcribed from diaries kept at the time. The first diary entry, on June 7, 1940, describes German troops descending on Paris. What follows is a startling firsthand account of the war, as told through the eyes of someone who experienced rebellion against the Nazi threat, imprisonment at the hands of merciless German troops and freedom as the war came to an end. Humbert’s meticulous eye for detail (even in chapters written after the fact) makes the book a compelling read. She chronicles the early days of the German occupation, when she and a group of friends hastily formed the publication Résistance, which ultimately led to her imprisonment by the Nazis. She chronicles the charges that were brought against her, the court case and her initial imprisonment in a forced-labor camp in Anrath, Germany. It was here that Humbert encountered genuine criminals (one woman had killed her son and two nephews by cutting off their hands) and experienced the barbaric conditions that would mark the rest of her time as a slave laborer in Germany. She made friends with some of the inmates, and occasionally a letter from a family member was passed on to her. Freed by U.S. forces in April 1945, she helped them expose some key members of the Nazi party during the month before VE Day, vividly described in a final chapter composed of contemporary diary entries.
A vital historical document.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-559-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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