Many well-written insights into how one captivating man’s mind works.
A South African priest recalls his experiences under apartheid while also highlighting his progressive views on diverse issues.
With his privileged upbringing, which included a stint at the exclusive English school Harrow, Yeats (Veritatis Splendor, 1995) could have easily slipped into a quiet, fulfilling life as a priest. Being quiet clearly never appealed to him, as he vividly illustrates here, though there’s no question that he found great fulfillment. In this memoir, Yeats slowly allows his remarkable life story to unfold while peppering the text with his closely held beliefs. As he recalls the events that led to his imprisonment in South Africa, which included an unexpected moment of prayer with the arresting officers just before they whisked him off to jail, Yeats also introduces us to his worldview, decidedly radical for a man of the church. Sex is not just for procreation, but something to be enjoyed by everyone, he believes, neatly weaving this conviction into the narrative by recalling his nascent fumblings with future wife Alison, the love of his life. (He also offers some interesting thoughts on homosexuality, both in society and within the Catholic Church.) The majority of these pages, however, concern his incarceration at the hands of the South African authorities for refusing to perform military service during the country’s apartheid era. Even here, Yeats is full of surprises, seemingly preferring the time he spent in solitary confinement to his tenure at Pretoria Central Prison, where he encountered some colorful and hair-raising characters. Yeats also examines societal changes in post-apartheid South Africa before concluding with a summation of his unique interpretation of Christian values.
Many well-written insights into how one captivating man’s mind works.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-84604-001-9
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Rider/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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