Nineteen years in Mao's labor camps—as chronicled by Wu (resident scholar at the Hoover Institution) and Wakeman (To the Storm—not reviewed). When the Communist forces took Shanghai in 1948, Wu (then 11) was living in a milieu of Western affluence and traditional culture. Although his father was a high-ranking bank official, the family remained in China, and in 1955 Wu, eager to build the new socialist society, went to the Beijing Geology Institute. He was devoted to his studies and to baseball, but he soon found that college life was dominated by political activities. His middle- class background and independent mind meant that he was repeatedly denounced for holding wrong opinions, even though he accepted Communism, and in April 1960, the morning after his graduation, he was summarily arrested as a political criminal and made to undergo reeducation through labor. His narrative takes us through years of deprivation, torture, and starvation in a world where the dead were carted out daily and the living were bombarded with ideological slogans. Among many others, we meet the peasant thief Xing, who teaches the young intellectual Wu the art of survival; and Lu, who loses his hope and sanity before finally succeeding in suicide. Wu was sustained by the insight that in such a world human life had no value, that the society was rotten if people didn't count, and that he would have a purpose if he tried to change that society. And thus, after his release and emigration to this country, he risked everything by returning to China in disguise with a CBS camera crew, and now has written this book. As an addition to the genre of Gulag literature, a remarkable and heroic story, recounted with great simplicity and nobility.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-55645-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
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