A courageous, surprisingly buoyant memoir from one of modern history’s most somber eras.
The author energetically chronicles his life as a young Jew living underground in Nazi Germany.
Born in Berlin of Russian immigrant parents, the 20-year-old Schönhaus saw his entire family deported to concentration camps in 1942. His own deportation was temporarily deferred due to his “voluntary” employment at an arms factory, where other Jews taught him to sabotage German gun barrels to prevent them from firing. The former graphic-arts student was then hired by prominent and heroic Jewish sympathizers to forge identity passes. He eventually used his talent to counterfeit hundreds of cards and passports for Jews threatened with deportation to Auschwitz and Majdanek. Schönhaus’s intelligent, engaging voice truly emerges in the second half of the book, where he describes his adventures as a Jew living under the Gestapo radar. He adopted the wildlife survival tactic of mimicry, determining that the more he acted like a swaggering German, the less likely anyone was to suspect that he was an illegal Jew—and the longer he would stay alive to aid the persecuted. Encouraged by memories of his father’s wisdom, Schönhaus lived like an apparent Prussian prince, dining in high-class restaurants, learning to sail, falling in and out of love. He resourcefully continued to frustrate the Gestapo, who posted his wanted photo all over Berlin. Heavy on adventure and light on violence, this brand of Holocaust memoir frees the author to voice the raw, poignant questions that Jews outside the camps pondered: “Would you have a toothbrush there?... Surely my vision of white huts was wrong. Where was Mama now? What had she been forced to see?” The climax delivers both structurally and emotionally, as Schönhaus tosses his bicycle in the bushes to swim the rest of the way to freedom in Switzerland, where he still lives.
A courageous, surprisingly buoyant memoir from one of modern history’s most somber eras.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7867-2058-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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
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
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