An intelligent recollection of a life devoted to politics and the public welfare.
In this brief memoir, a man recounts his experiences as a researcher, a member of the British Parliament, and a Jew.
Moonman’s (Learning to Live in the Violent Society, 2005, etc.) father, Borach, was born in 1878 in Berdichev, Russia, a small city not far from Odessa. In response to a lack of opportunity and burgeoning anti-Semitism, he moved to Liverpool, where he started a milk distribution business. The author was Borach’s ninth child after eight girls were born, and was a precocious lover of cinema and football. His family left Liverpool in 1940 to escape the devastating German bombing campaigns, a move that effectively forced Moonman’s father into retirement. When still only 13 years old, the author left school—he needed permission from the local labor exchange because he was so young—to begin work for a local newspaper in Liverpool. He subsequently gained an apprenticeship with a printing firm. Meanwhile, he studied economics at Liverpool College of Commerce—later he became a full-time student at the University of Liverpool—and founded the first Guild of Young Printers, which was sponsored by the Typographical Association. After working at the British Institute of Management, he won a seat in Parliament representing Basildon in Essex. Moonman meticulously remembers his work as an MP—he served more than once—in particular his devotion to public health, the fight against racism, and human rights. He also discusses in vivid detail his visit to Greece to provide humanitarian aid after it was stricken by an earthquake in 1953, and a trip to Namibia at the behest of the International Red Cross to help draft a socio-economic plan for the nation. Moonman writes in clear, if sometimes clunky, prose, and his remembrances of political maneuvering can be needlessly microscopic. But his life is truly memorable, and his interests are as diverse as they are energetically pursued. The most thoughtful discussions are about his experiences as a Jew frequently encountering prejudice, and his philosophical commitments to both Zionism and socialism. For those interested in the inner workings of public service in England, this is an insightful treatment.
An intelligent recollection of a life devoted to politics and the public welfare.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-8504-1
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2017
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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