Flawed but well-researched and often stirring.
An art historian’s account of the research she undertook to understand the life of a mysterious uncle.
Lipton (French Seduction: An American's Encounter with France, Her Father, and the Holocaust, 2007, etc.) had always known that her father, Louis, had singled her out as his favorite and the one who would bear the memories of his younger brother, Dave. “He baited my curiosity,” she writes, with stories of an elusive young man whose life “could have gone almost anywhere” but who decided to dedicate himself to leftist politics and a conflict—the Spanish Civil War—that eventually killed him. The impulse to know her uncle, however, did not emerge until she was well into adulthood. As she questioned the father from whom she found herself periodically estranged, she was confronted with Louis’ inexplicable rage over letters that Dave had sent home from Spain. Determined to discover the truth about her uncle’s life and her father’s family, Lipton began to research the part he played in the war at museums and veterans’ societies in New York and Boston. Her work eventually unearthed the names of fellow soldiers who knew Dave and attested to his “gentleness and commitment…[and] mildness of manner.” She also learned about the expatriates like her uncle who chose to fight for Spain: passion drove them, but so did a burning desire to “[b]ecome part of something” greater than themselves. Their stories and testimonials allowed Lipton to imagine her uncle, his world, and her father and eventually uncover a bitter family truth. Louis—a man who had “made money…[and] forgot [his] idealism”—had been jealous enough of Dave to want to make their parents believe that their beloved youngest child never loved them enough to write from Spain. That Lipton never elaborates on the complications that arose between herself and her father lessens the emotional impact of the book, but the abiding love she reveals for the uncle she never met is heartfelt.
Flawed but well-researched and often stirring.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8263-5658-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of New Mexico
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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