Chess prestidigitation—in more ways than one—by a Soviet ex- champion. Remember Karpov? He was the bad guy, the wolfish-looking favorite of Soviet hard-liners who a few years ago lost his title to handsome good-guy dissident Gary Kasparov. But what's this? Did we get it all wrong? A charming, if utterly eccentric, Karpov emerges here, prattling disingenuously about his childhood chess obsession, which sounds like something out of Nabokov or the wet- dreams of pawn-pushers everywhere: chess contains not only ``harmony'' but ``goodness''; in fact, ``everything is contained within it, even immortality.'' Great stuff, this chessophilia, and Karpov's rise to prominence is told thrillingly. Along the way, we also meet, to our astonishment, Karpov the dissident, ever distrustful of Stalinist thugs, bureaucratic stagnation, and prisons disguised as mental hospitals. But didn't Karpov hate Korchnoi—his primary chess opponent for most of his career—for defecting to the West? No, for Korchnoi he feels only ``pity and regret'' because ``I was mightier.'' Doesn't he hate Kasparov for being a democrat? No, the trouble is that Kasparov is ``unprincipled,'' ``a hypocrite'' who believes ``might makes right''—in fact, Karpov intimates, as we tumble with him through the Looking-Glass (on the other side of which, as you recall, mad hatters and dodos scramble over a crazy chessboard), the reason he lost the world championship wasn't because he choked, but because Kasparov hired a ``parapsychologist'' who messed with his head. The only living player whom Karpov deems his equal is Bobby Fischer, whom he never played and who doesn't play anymore. He describes Fischer as ``unique in his solitude.'' That makes two. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-689-12060-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
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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