An appealing new voice whispers words that convey the range of human emotions.
An affecting memoir by a young Englishwoman who was studying in Russia as the Soviet system crumbled.
Beginning when she was a child, Hobson describes the weekly Russian lessons near Southampton that her mother, née Tatyana Vinogradoff, took because she did not want to lose the language. Hobson was 17 when her mother died of cancer, and to honor her lost parent she resolved to study Russian herself. Her decision to do so in the remote town of Voronezh instead of Moscow—in 1991, at the very moment the Soviet monolith was cracking—marks her early on as a fearless, even daring traveler. She lived in a seedy hostel where, she writes, “A hubble of languages rose through the smoke and pungent smells of ten dinners cooking in one kitchen.” Hobson uses a swift and accurate brush to paint the portraits of her friends and acquaintances, and despite this brief volume still finds room for indelible portraits of the woman she calls “Liza Minnelli” because of a physical resemblance, Sveta (“She carried her beauty as though it were a mild disability”), and—most searchingly—her lover Mitya, who stands with resignation in a wrenching scene on a train platform as Hobson departs forever for England at year’s end. Hobson’s eye for arresting detail presents a Russian cold so severe that it freezes the town clock solid, and a statue of Stalin whose head has been removed and replaced with that of the local poet Kolstov. And she can set forth a touching tale with a few perfect words, as when she repeats the Russian story of a man who wears iron boots for 20 years, finally removes them . . . and flies away.
An appealing new voice whispers words that convey the range of human emotions.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6932-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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