A valuable resource for war-journalism buffs, who can only hope that Stevens’s memoirs will someday be published in full,...
Absorbing but erratic portrait of a charismatic, little-known American who was the longest-serving journalist in the Soviet Union.
Edmund Stevens went to Russia in 1934 to work as a translator and writer for the Communist International’s publishing house; the idealistic American communist wanted to contribute to the Bolshevik cause. Fired during a 1937 Stalinist purge that saw most of the publishing house’s senior officials “repressed,” Stevens turned to journalism and became a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in 1939. He solidified the Monitor’s reputation as a leader in war reporting, and he won a Pulitzer in 1950 for his articles on Stalin’s purges. He died in 1992, but Heckler (English and Journalism/Miami Univ. of Ohio; Heart and Soul of the Nation: How the Spirituality of Our First Ladies Changed America, 1997) focuses on the World War II years. Stevens had no formal training as a journalist, she writes, but his uncanny ability to anticipate where the next big story would be took him to the frontlines in small, overlooked nations such as Finland, Norway, Lithuania and Ethiopia. He also boasted a memorable skill in summing up a place or situation with colorful, often humorous details. Documenting the day-to-day impact of the war on both soldiers and ordinary civilians, Heckler notes, Stevens could never maintain a stable home life, frequently abandoning his long-suffering wife to return to the front lines. Regrettably, Heckler’s clunky, distracting choice of format significantly detracts from the journalist’s riveting story. Excerpts from his unpublished memoir are interspersed at random intervals with observations from Heckler and other journalists, with little indication as to whether the material is contemporary or historical. Stevens’s fascinating recollections would have been better served by a series of detailed chapter introductions than by Heckler’s frequent, awkward interruptions.
A valuable resource for war-journalism buffs, who can only hope that Stevens’s memoirs will someday be published in full, unmarred by Heckler’s intrusive editing.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1770-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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