Narrowly focused, but inspiring.
A harrowing memoir by an athlete who survived the Hutu-Tutsi genocide.
Tuhabonye grew up in Burundi, one of four children in the respected, devoutly Catholic Tutsi family. Driven yet sweet, he knew that “education was the key to my future,” and he studied hard. He also loved to run, and by the time he was a teenager dreamed of winning a running scholarship to a college in the U.S. Then, in October 1993, when Tuhabonye was in the middle of what should have been his last year of preparatory school, he was caught in an episode of senseless violence. A group of Hutus came to his school and killed most of the Tutsis with machetes. The rest of the Tutsi students, including Tuhabonye, were stacked in a burning pyre. During hours of agony, Tuhabonye was sustained by a voice that assured him that he would somehow get out alive. Indeed, he was the only Tutsi to survive the massacre. The story of that violent day is told in flashbacks interspersed throughout the otherwise chronological memoir, perhaps because co-author Brozek (Divorced from the Mob, 2004) knew the horrifying account of butchery would be too much for most readers to take all in one piece. After his miraculous escape from the Hutus, Tuhabonye faced a long recovery. That he is able to run again (he is now training for the 2008 Olympics) is impressive enough. Even more remarkable is his spiritual and personal recovery. Drawing on his unwavering faith, Tuhabonye forgives his Hutu tormentors. Later chapters describe his immigration to the U.S., graduation from Abilene Christian University and marriage to a fellow Burundian, with whom he now lives in Austin. The only element his moving book lacks is a sustained analysis of the Hutu-Tutsi struggles and Burundi’s political landscape, which would have given it broader appeal.
Narrowly focused, but inspiring.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-081751-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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