A surprisingly novel addition to a crowded field of scholarship.
A witness to German cruelty makes the case that Germans are adequately confronting their past.
“Germany, always vulnerable to charges of xenophobia, has been forced by history to be Europe’s most open society,” writes journalist Sereny (Cries Unheard, 1999, etc.). This is as much a synopsis of her earlier works on various Nazis as a chronicle of growing up during WWII, and here, the author argues that Germany’s character has been forever changed—in some sense for the better—by the terrors of Hitler’s regime. Having written about Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, and Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, Austria-born Sereny has come into contact with Germans of all stripes, from random teenagers to Leni Riefenstahl, the great documentary filmmaker. She’s discovered that both the young and old are grappling with the Holocaust and Germany’s role in the war, the former out of curiosity, the latter out of a sense of duty. But both groups also complain that the middle-aged have chosen to repress their nation’s history. This silence, and the critics’ reactions to it, constitutes the wound that is healing Germany by being a cause for debate. Between that silence and those who would speak openly about the past lies a string of other concerns. Sereny tells of her experiences tracking down babies kidnapped from territories conquered by Germans, for example, using those experiences to show how ordinary folks fooled themselves into thinking nothing was wrong with raising and loving stolen children. Sereny never abstracts the issue of memory and the horrors of war. Her stories are always personal: the Nazi official who can’t admit to knowing about the Final Solution, despite his superhuman grasp of government affairs; the member of the French resistance who insists Sereny have a bath before leaving France; the regular German soldiers who gladly share their meal with her as she crosses the Pyrennes.
A surprisingly novel addition to a crowded field of scholarship.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04428-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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