A book of unusually humane power and astounding moral clarity: evenhanded but pointing a reproachful finger at all the right...
Harrowing but hopeful account of the genocide in Sudan, as told by one of the courageous locals who make it possible for a stubborn cadre of journalists to bring word of the atrocities to the outside world.
Hari belongs to the Zaghawa tribe, which when he was a boy came into increasing conflict with Arab nomads grazing their animals without permission on Zaghawa lands. The government in Khartoum encouraged the nomads, just as it encouraged the Arab militias called Janjaweed to kill non-Arab Africans and burn their homes. After a brutal assault by the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed on his village, Hari narrowly escaped to a refugee camp in Chad. There, he put his limited English and affable manner to work, hiring himself out as a translator and all-around fixer to many foreign journalists, who soon couldn’t do without his impressive Rolodex and his ability to make friends nearly everywhere. Crossing back into the conflict zone exposed Hari and his employers to indescribable tragedies. Following one particularly senseless massacre of 81 villagers by the Janjaweed, the BBC reporters he was with entered a medical clinic for three days “to recover from what they saw, and smelled, and learned about the nature of what simply must be called evil.” Yet Hari refuses merely to recite a litany of woe; he takes time to recount, in more vivid detail than that of any Westerner’s Darfur memoir, the history of Darfur’s ancient kingdoms, their hereditary system of sheiks and sultans and the complex interconnections among all Sudanese, who until recently mingled freely across racial and religious lines. The narrative displays a light touch befitting the author’s friendly disposition; even near the end, when he describes a frightening period of torture and imprisonment, he remains the kind of man who wants to look for the good in everybody.
A book of unusually humane power and astounding moral clarity: evenhanded but pointing a reproachful finger at all the right targets.Pub Date: March 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6744-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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