A curious study of fleshly weakness and the will to survive—and a representation certain to yield controversy.
A troubling portrait of an iconic figure of the Holocaust and his sad, secretive life during and after the Nazi era.
Lee, a biographer of Otto’s daughter (Roses from the Earth, not reviewed, etc.) and associate of the Anne Frank Trust, brings due sympathy to bear on Otto, a German Jew who had served with distinction in the Kaiser’s army, succeeded in business, but was forced out of Nazi Germany into neighboring Holland. There he established a spice-importing firm, some of whose employees were members of the Dutch Nazi Party—many Netherlanders, Lee writes, were glad to join the crusade to purge Europe of Jews; whereas the survival rate for French Jews was something like 75 percent, only 25 percent of those in the Netherlands saw the fall of the Nazi regime. A Dutch Nazi acquaintance of one of those employees began to blackmail Otto, and for a time he kept the knowledge of Frank’s secret annex to himself until someone—Lee has a strong opinion on who that was—phoned the Gestapo to betray the Frank family. Amazingly, the blackmail resumed after the war and Otto’s relocation to Switzerland. What was the basis of thug Tonny Ahlers’s hold over Otto? Lee suggests that it had to do with Frank’s collaboration with the occupying Wehrmacht, to which he sold pectin and other materiel; adultery may have figured into the matter, too, for Ahlers’s acquaintance suspected that his wife had been having an affair with Frank. Lee does not condemn Frank, though she points to some strange choices he made while editing his daughter’s famous diaries for publication, as well as his approval of a German translation that altered lines such as “only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German” to “all civilized languages . . . but softly!”—all of which brought Frank fortune, and Ahlers too.
A curious study of fleshly weakness and the will to survive—and a representation certain to yield controversy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052082-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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