Skip this and go straight to the sources.
A frenetic look at the controversial friendship between a literary and a political giant.
On April 9, 1948, following the assassination of revolutionary political leader Jorge Gaitán, two law students joined the rioting on the streets of Bogotá, Colombia. Though they didn’t yet know each other, the momentous night made a significant impact on both men—Fidel Castro has now famously written about seeing amid the chaos a young man with a typewriter. That man was Nobel Prize–winning author Gabriel García Márquez. Nearly ten years later, Márquez, then a journalist, moved to Havana to cover the Castro revolution and was so inspired by the leader that he opened first the Bogotá and then the North American branch of Prensa Latina, Castro’s news agency. From this collaboration a friendship blossomed. For literature fans, Márquez’s political activism might come as a surprise. Prior to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, the author and his family suffered from crippling poverty. Even after his international success, he believed that Castro’s politics were the answer to the many social and economic problems plaguing Latin America. Historians Esteban (Latin American Literature/Univ. of Granada) and Panichelli (Modern Languages/Wingate Univ.) chronicle the friendship through a list-like description of events that, while peppered with analysis, is hardly a riveting narrative. The authors’ research is careful and thorough, and details of the friendship humanize both legendary figures. However, Márquez also wrote about this profound friendship in his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale (2002), and his version is compelling and moving in a way that this second-person account could never be.
Skip this and go straight to the sources.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-058-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
