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A JOURNEY BACK

Name: A JOURNEY BACK
Author: Arnon Tamir
ISBN: 0-8101-1186-1

INJUSTICE AND RESTITUTION

by Arnon Tamir ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1997

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A brief, intriguing memoir, by an Israeli kibbutznik, of the early years of the Nazi regime, which he witnessed as an adolescent, interspersed with accounts of his postwar struggle to come to terms with Germany and gain restitution. Tamir begins by recalling his sense of rootedness in Germany: He and his peers were as likely to sing songs of the Thirty Years' War as Zionist melodies. Indeed, his family's Jewishness was highly attenuated; his father never spoke of his East European origins and his parents observed few of the religious rituals. Yet anti- Semitism was pervasive, both pre- and post-Hitler. Particularly interesting are Tamir's descriptions of life in rural Germany in the 1930s. After his father lost his cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Tamir left home, taking a job with a sympathetic gardener. He was deported to Poland in 1938, later entering Palestine illegally. His style here is highly associative, flowing backward and forward in time and across space between Germany and Israel. Vignettes in Germany spark off memories of Palestine shortly before and during Israel's War of Independence, when Tamir's kibbutz was besieged. Like many idealistic German Jews in Israel, Tamir is sensitive to the way in which Jewish settlers, many of them driven from Europe, displaced some Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. But his attempts to weave together the passages on Israel and Germany don't quite work; the former seem more truncated and less satisfying, in terms of dramatic narrative, than the latter. Returning to postwar Germany, he encounters some predictable complacency and denial about the Holocaust, as well as some surprises. Among them: a hyper-rational German bureaucrat who, although she initially appears rigid about restitution regulations, turns out to be struggling with a sense of responsibility for Nazism and its Jewish victims. Tamir's taut, disturbing memoir derives much of its power from such stereotype-shattering individuals. A thoughtful, gripping work.

Pub Date: June 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-8101-1186-1

Page Count: 125

Publisher: Northwestern Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)