Ample yet unassuming, and illustrated with period photos and evocative paintings by Franca, this touching memoir is an...
An inspiring tale of quiet heroism during wartime.
In an Author’s Note, first-time biographer Kinman begins the story of her neighbor with the assertion that “writing a memoir means: what happened happened, there is no fantasy in reality.” However, what results here is a real story, as she seamlessly relates Franca’s experiences in war-torn northern Italy during the years 1937-45. In fact, some of the more captivating moments in the narrative contradict Kinman’s avowal of the real–Franca’s experiences demonstrate the need for fantasy in reality, particularly when that reality is shattered by war. Born the youngest of seven into an upper-class Florentine family in 1926, Franca witnesses the breakup of her happy home as her brothers are sent off to war, some of her sisters marry and leave and the rest of the family is forced to flee to the Italian Riviera. She and her aged parents end up virtually imprisoned in Villa Pianore, near Capezzano, where hundreds of elderly Italians seek refuge from the occupying Germans. Young Franca shows great bravery and ingenuity as she scavenges nearby fields for food for the villa’s refugees, but an even more poignant scene occurs in the kitchen, where the starving Franca and a friend retreat to read recipes to one other. Reciting the ingredients engages the girls’ imaginations and momentarily staves off their hunger.
Ample yet unassuming, and illustrated with period photos and evocative paintings by Franca, this touching memoir is an enjoyable journey for lovers of Italy and those interested in tales of courage.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-9763929-0-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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