Charming memoir by prolific specialist in Japanese literature Keene (Travelers of a Hundred Ages, 1989, etc.), who seems to have found a culture that mirrored his character traits of introversion and flight into deep study. During the Depression, Keene won a four-year scholarship to Columbia, where he took up Chinese studies, then was led by a fellow student into the study of Japanese. Come Pearl Harbor, Keene volunteered for the Navy Language School at Berkeley. With no knowledge of warships or navigation, he entered the Pacific war as a Japanese language officer and was shipped as a lieutenant to Pearl Harbor. Stupefying boredom with useless translations led him to translating bloodsoaked diaries taken from dead Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal and elsewhere, wherein he found an immense reservoir of feelings, while his duties censoring US sailors' letters revealed little but their desire to return home. Keene relished his free time among Japanese, Chinese, and Korean civilians in Honolulu and had absolutely no desire to go back to the States. At war's end, he was sent to China as a war-crimes investigator, a job he hated; then he granted himself a week's leave in Japan, which thrilled him, although he would not return there for another eight years. Back at Columbia, he found himself drawn to literary rather than philosophical Japanese writers. Later, in England on a scholarship to Cambridge, he taught conversational Japanese and remained abroad five years. His first published book disappeared unread, as did his second, though his third was a success. And at last the Ford Foundation sent him back to Japan, where he met Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, and ``Renaissance Man'' Kobo Abe. Keene complains of lukewarm or worse reviews of his monumental survey volume World Without Walls (1976)—but the Kirkus reviewer gave it the same high praise this memoir deserves as well.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56836-006-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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