Dutiful but dim. (b&w photographs throughout)
A new voice sings an earnest but commonplace paean to her mother, whose grit and imagination helped her three young children survive nearly four years of imprisonment during the Japanese occupation of Java in WWII.
Kelly, whose parents were Dutch, was only four years old when the Japanese invaded Java and began rounding up able-bodied men, her father among them, to build the Burma Road and forcing women and children into squalid camps. After an introduction that is a museum of clichés—her experiences, Kelly says, were like a “horrendous nightmare”—she offers a snapshot of the family in 1946: The war is over, and they have arrived back in Holland virtually penniless but with one dear possession they managed to retain—a painting of a flamboya tree. She then returns to 1942 and her Javanese life before the invasion. Her father inherited his own father’s spice company, and the family enjoyed the easy quasi-colonial life of private swimming clubs, exotic food, and cheap servants. Throughout, Kelly seems blithely unaware of the moral algebra of her situation. Was the Japanese displacement of the Dutch so much different from the Dutch displacement of the Javanese? Kelly sees few if any connections. Instead, she notes without irony, “Our wonderful servants stood ever ready with their kindly faces to indulge our whims.” Soon enough, her father is taken away and the family is arrested and confined to a round of near-starvation, endless roll calls in intense heat, physical abuse by guards, and odious physical labor. Kelly recalls the children’s terrorizing by a guard’s fierce pet monkey, brutal fights among the prisoners, and a Christmas chorus of “Silent Night.” Eventually, the family returns to Holland and an oddly cold grandmother who cannot understand why they didn’t just escape. Kelly still has the painting of the tree.
Dutiful but dim. (b&w photographs throughout)Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50621-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
