Articulate, touching and hopeful.
Artful memoir about the angst and joys of growing up behind the Iron Curtain.
Gorokhova vividly evokes the bleak years of the latter half of the 20th century in Russia, when the Great Patriotic War was followed by the Cold War and food shortages were the norm. The author blends cultural history into her narrative of daily life in cold Leningrad. She recalls gathering mushrooms with her mother, a professor of anatomy, and her sister, an actress. She dreamed of fishing in the Gulf of Finland with her father, a loyal party functionary. A sympathetic uncle once wrapped a stolen kotlety, complete with mushroom sauce, in a newspaper for her. She learned to join the longest queue she saw because something worthwhile might be at its end. She absorbed the teachings of Checkhov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lenin. She built friendships and nurtured adolescent crushes. Even though privacy was an unknown concept—there was no word in the Russian language for it—kissing, notes the author, was the same on either side of the cultural divide. Because of the author’s proficiency in the English language, including “the twelve tricky tenses,” she landed a job in the House of Friendship and Peace and also worked as a guide for foreign tourists. It was her language skills that facilitated emigration, and marriage provided the ticket to the unknown West. Now, years later, oligarchs have replaced apparatchiks, Leningrad is St. Petersburg again and Gorokhova is content in her new home. “In our private American space,” she writes, “we can splice the cleaved halves of our souls and heals; we can change if we want to—transform ourselves, as my actress sister knows how to do—and no one will say we’ve betrayed the collective. We can simply live, and keep the door open, and wait for whatever enters.”
Articulate, touching and hopeful.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-2567-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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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