A masterful, beguiling account of an extraordinary man.
Wyatt (A Small Town’s Sacrifices, 2012, etc.) recounts the remarkable life of a Belgian patriot in this biography.
At the opening of this book, 10-year-old Josse Flasschoen attends a military parade with his family in 1901. At the sight of the soldiers on horseback, he declares to his mother, “I am proud to be a Belgian!” Soon afterward, he gets in a minor tussle with a policeman who used too much force while trying to keep spectators off the street. This strong sense of patriotism and intolerance for injustice remained with Flasschoen throughout his life. The biography’s first section examines its subject’s time in the Belgian Congo; the second looks at his involvement in World War II; and the third considers his legacy. At 20, Flasschoen was sent by the Belgian government to the newly acquired colony in the Belgian Congo. There, he established a successful palm oil plantation and gained the respect of many native people, whom he deeply respected, as well. They gave him the playful tribal moniker “Ndekendek”: “the man who runs like a bird.” Later, the palm oil trade slumped, and Josse and his family returned to Belgium in 1933. As World War II grew closer, Flasschoen worked undercover for French intelligence, investigating German invasion plans. On May 10, 1940, German planes filled the skies above Brussels, and Flasschoen knew that his life would be irrevocably changed. Overall, this is a complex, richly detailed story—a biography that’s as captivating as historical fiction. The author shows rare skill at evocatively describing settings in very few words: “The heat was unbearable, especially around the noon hour and early afternoon….It was also when flies fiercely buzzed around people, black or white, and the animals.” He also creates penetrating psychological profiles of various figures, and he provides well-researched historical data. The archival photographs included throughout the text bring the story even further to life. Anyone with an interest in early-20th-century European history, or World War II in particular, will relish this book.
A masterful, beguiling account of an extraordinary man.Pub Date: April 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-1430-1
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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