Weaving the personal and political tightly together, novelist Slovo creates an incisive and unflinching portrait of her prominent South African family. At the height of apartheid, perhaps no two white South Africans were more hated and more admired than Slovo's parents, Ruth First and Joe Slovo. As prominent members of the ANC and the South African Communist Party (which Joe would eventually head), they had gone where few white South Africans dared. Not content with the subdued grumbling and subversive tea parties that usually passed for anti-apartheid activism in their privileged circle, they became increasingly radicalized and escaped into exile. While Ruth fought for the cause largely through journalism and academic research, Joe lived a life of secrecy and subterfuge, planning how to hit back at the apartheid regime through sabotage and terror. Though the South African government wanted both of them dead, Ruth was the easier target. In 1982, a mail bomb killed her in Mozambique. Joe lived to help negotiate—peacefully—South Africa's future. But soon after Mandela appointed him minister of housing, he was stricken with cancer and quickly died. As Slovo investigates the wilderness of mirrors that constituted her parents' political lives, she also tries to discover who they really were as individuals behind the secrets and the lies. She has covered some of this ground before in fiction (Ties of Blood, 1990), but what she discovered and recounts here has a strangeness and piquancy quite beyond her fictive powers. Not only does she track down and confront one of the men responsible for her mother's death—a cool and clever equivocator, largely unrepentant—she also movingly details the pain and the pride she felt growing up in such strange, terrible times. A memorable and emotionally compelling achievement.
Pub Date: May 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-79923-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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