A slightly odd but ultimately very satisfying biography of a man who, in terms of political and historical impact, has been called ``the dominant writer of this century.'' George Kennan described The Gulag Archipelago as ``the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levelled in modern times.'' The irony is that the indictment came not from the West, but from a heroic survivor of the Gulag. It is the particular merit of this book that it shows such an understanding of the qualities that were required to survive the camps, to write with such demonic intensity, to fight against the constant threats and surveillance of the KGB, and to make no compromises with the truth. He and his wife solemnly agreed that they were prepared to sacrifice their own lives and those of their children, rather than betray what he had written. Such a man, as the noted novelist Thomas (The White Hotel, 1981; Lady with a Laptop, 1996; etc.) writes with delicate irony, ``could not also be your clubbable nice guy from next door.'' Without stinting the importance of what Solzhenitsyn did, Thomas gives a just appraisal of the human cost to those with whom he worked, particularly his first wife, of that total dedication. He also brings up-to-date the incomparable 1984 biography by Michael Scammell, and through interviews with Solzhenitsyn's first wife and access to material that has recently become available, including KGB files and debates in the Politburo, adds new and important material. The value of the book is lessened, however, by its heavy reliance on Scammell, its occasional ``imagined'' scenes and its crude Freudian analogies (Solzhenitsyn's supposedly ``anal'' temperament). Somewhat overwritten at the start (Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, is described as ``goatee-bearded El Greco of terror, death's Stakhanovite''), it becomes simpler and better written as it goes on. A sympathetic and judicious appraisal that will deepen the understanding of this remarkable man.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18036-5
Page Count: 564
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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 2026 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.
