This significant Holocaust memoir of a girl hiding in Holland will be compared to Anne Frank’s diary, though it is very different. Yes, Edith went into hiding in the same city and same month as Anne Frank, and her mother even met Miep Gies, who hid the Franks. But while the Frank diary took decades to get recognized, this book (largely in diary format) was condensed by Reader’s Digest, won a literary award in England, and will be published in four other languages. Anne was also a precocious preteen, but more famous for diary entries on her family’s psychology and philosophical musings. Edith isn’t analytical, but her description is superior. In the 1940 invasion of neutral and safe Holland, for example, anti-aircraft fire is “heavy dark smoke clouds and little gray puffs, like bubbles,” and German paratroopers arrive in “hundreds of little black balloons.” Because she was, at 14, an ordinary teenager, she talks about boys, skating, school, and clothes. A very secular person with a Jewish grandmother, Edith sees herself as Jewish when Nazi laws forbid her from attending school or riding her bike. She wears the “ugly” yellow star of David as a “badge of honor” that prompts the sympathetic Dutch to say, “Keep your chin up.” As the situation deteriorates, her ailing mother and grandmother are caught by the Germans, one older brother escapes to America, and her non-Jewish father wastes away. Once the coddled baby, Edith has to spend her late teens posing as a gentile with the zur Kleinmiedes family—who already had to board Nazi officers. She can only shout her real name to the wind, thinking about deprivations like their one-egg-a-month ration and waiting for liberation. In another major difference from Anne Frank, Edith survives to double her diary’s content with adult comments. A valuable opportunity to see the situation just outside Anne’s attic.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56947-178-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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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