Witty and warm.
A caught-between-two-worlds memoir by an American who married a Slovenian and now lives in Ljubljana.
After meeting her black-haired Slovenian poet at a party in Brooklyn in 1991, the author resolved to renounce her life as a financial analyst in New York, marry him and live in Slovenia, which had been a republic of Yugoslavia until after the Ten Day War with the Yugoslav army in 1991. Aleš Debeljak had just won a prestigious national poetry award and wanted to move back permanently to his newly independent country. When the author first told them about her decision, her family, friends and colleagues thought she was crazy, a sentiment driven mostly by their utter ignorance about the country. Ensconced in Ljubljana, the picturesque capital designed by Jože Plecnik, Debeljak attended language school—her rendering of vernacular vocabulary is quite funny—occasionally went out at night with Aleš to one of the city’s three bars, became thoroughly acquainted with the stultifying maze of bureaucracy and, when she became pregnant, was confronted with a slew of superstitious beliefs she was powerless to resist. However, she gradually came to love her husband’s forest-filled homeland and its many fractured identities. Though the story is now dated more than 15 years, it serves as a touching record of the mores of a country that remains a strange, unknown land to most Western readers.
Witty and warm.Pub Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55643-740-3
Page Count: 262
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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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