A nuanced testament to the complexity of the human spirit.
On May 6, 2013, electrifying headlines revealed news of the escape of three young women who had been missing for more than 10 years and presumed dead but were in fact held captive by Ariel Castro, a depraved Cleveland school bus driver.
Jordan and Sullivan, Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post journalists (The Prison Angel: Mother Antonia’s Journey from Beverly Hills to a Life of Service in a Mexican Jail, 2005) weave together a compelling chronicle of Berry and DeJesus' harrowing experiences in captivity, told in their own words and in a journal that Berry kept on scraps of paper. Berry tells how she was walking home after completing work when she made the tragic blunder of accepting a ride from Castro. Because he was the father of a former co-worker, she agreed to his making a brief stop at his house along the way. Once in the house, he overpowered and raped her and chained her to a bed in a room without windows. The date was April 21, 2003, the day before her 17th birthday. Only gradually did she realize that another victim (Michelle Knight) was also being held captive. In April 2004, 14-year-old DeJesus suffered the same fate. Jordan and Sullivan give an account of the continuing efforts of the police—prodded by their families—to discover their whereabouts. Berry relates how her relationship with Castro was transformed by the birth of their daughter, Jocelyn, in 2006. He doted on Jocelyn and over time became less vigilant, allowing Berry to escape. She also explores her own mixed feelings on hearing of his suicide in prison: “He kidnapped me, chained me like a dog in his house, and raped me over and over but he was Jocelyn's father. She loves him and he loved her.”
A nuanced testament to the complexity of the human spirit.Pub Date: April 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42765-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2015
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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