A dramatic story, well told, of an authentic hero who has been rightly dubbed “America’s Oskar Schindler.”
The stirring story of an American journalist who, working in Vichy France, helped thousands of artists and intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann and Marc Chagall, escape Nazi persecution.
Little in Varian Fry’s early background suggested that he would become a heroic rescuer of refugees. An only child from a privileged background, Fry grew up a spoiled, somewhat arrogant hypochondriac aesthete, and intellectual. But in one of the jobs he drifted through after graduating from Harvard, Fry witnessed the beatings of Jews in Berlin and, as a result, tried to awaken readers to the growing Nazi menace. After France fell to Hitler in June 1940, Fry, his wife, and others helped organize an Emergency Rescue Committee dedicated to saving intellectuals and others trapped in France. It’s at this point that Marino’s (Herschel: The Boy Who Started World War II, 1997) narrative, previously largely a biography of an interesting but obscure intellectual, turns into an account that reads like spy fiction. Fry arrived in Marseilles and founded the Centre Americain de Secours, ostensibly dedicated to legal charitable activities but really devoted to the rescue, by illegal means, of intellectuals in danger of persecution by the Nazis. Aided by an unlikely combination of expatriate liberals, Communists, intellectuals, and members of French criminal organizations, Fry helped approximately 2,000 writers, artists, and scientists (and others, including escaped British prisoners of war) escape across the Pyrenees into Spain, using false documents procured by Fry. Despite increasingly sinister harassment by Vichy’s Fascist regime and the Gestapo, sniping by isolationist State Department officials, unwanted publicity by some of the refugees, and diminishing support by pusillanimous or jealous colleagues in New York, Fry continued his secret work until August 1941, when he was expelled from France. He died in 1967.
A dramatic story, well told, of an authentic hero who has been rightly dubbed “America’s Oskar Schindler.”Pub Date: Aug. 24, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20356-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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