Strong writing barely illuminates the murky narrative.
A British-American journalist wrestles with his parents’ demons, taking him back to Cold War–era Prague.
Laurence’s memoir chronicles the period during which he and his family lived in Prague, the late 1950s. His father was serving as an officer in the British Foreign Office, and his glamorous mother had an affair with a Czech playboy and impresario who was also collaborating with the Communist police. During this time, the author’s sister, Kate—she was eight when they arrived in 1957, he was seven—developed anorexia and began a dangerous see-sawing cycle of weight loss that ruined her health and caused her untimely death in 2000. Laurence chases, but never adequately answers, the question, what really happened to Kate in Prague? The “social agent” of the title, and fulcrum of the story, was an attractive man the family met in Prague—Jirí Mucha, who had escaped the German invasion of Czechoslovakia during the war, aided the British, spent time in prison after the Soviets took Czechoslovakia and, according to files the author recently found, spied for the Communist state in order to maintain his fabulous lifestyle. This included Mucha’s accomplished wife, Geraldine, whom the author was able to visit in Prague when she was nearly 90; numerous mistresses (orgies were hinted at, involving teenaged girls); and professional seductions, such as the British attaché’s wife, Mrs. Laurence. The author hints at many dark secrets that are left unexplored, such as the deep resentment he feels toward his mother—revealed in one shocking confrontation between them as the father lay dying—and the espionage angle serves as a pretense to investigate a much deeper family wound.
Strong writing barely illuminates the murky narrative.Pub Date: March 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56663-845-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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