Personal testimony of a life of extremes, from Auschwitz horrors to American success. Michel begins with Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 that the Germans and Austrians destroyed synagogues and Jewish buildings. He was then a young boy living with his family in comfortable circumstances in Mannheim—but at age 15, he was separated from his family and taken to Auschwitz, where his parents and grandmother died (Michel's sister left home at age ten, to live as a refuge with a family in France). The author witnessed unbearable atrocities in the camp, including the conducting of medical experiments on girls and women by Joseph Mengele (the Auschwitz ``Doctor of Death''); the constant deaths of friends; and the unfathomable cruelty of Nazi soldiers. He spent ``six hundred seventy four days in a man-made hell,'' and promised his friends to record what he saw: ``I tried to describe a world that accepted hatred for and discrimination against Jews.'' Michel was on the 15- hour march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, a camp whose gate was inscribed ``Right or Wrong—My Country,'' and, directly underneath, ``To Each His Own.'' Late in the afternoon of April 15, 1945, the author and two friends escaped. Six weeks later, he was the first Jew to return to Mannheim, where he was mistakenly arrested by American soldiers, then helped considerably by a Jewish lieutenant who became a major force in his life. Michel—whose sister survived in Israel—became a successful speaker and fund-raiser for the United Jewish Appeal in America, and, in the last 15 years, has returned to Mannheim, led a group to Auschwitz, and participated in the World Gathering of Survivors in Israel. Michel records his life in only perfunctory detail but still shows how strong the will to survive can be. (Sixteen pages of photographs)
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-9623032-4-0
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Barricade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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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