A beautifully wrought wartime account; highly recommended for its portrait of the human side of a horrifying period of...
A writer brings her perspective as a therapist with a love of mythology to her debut memoir of growing up in Amsterdam during World War II.
Before the Nazis arrived, de Vries and her parents lived a vibrant life with colorful neighbors in a charming city full of promise. That changed when the author witnessed a little girl in a crowd being taken away by Nazis. Soon after, her father was sent to a camp as a prisoner of war. De Vries was only able to offer her father her toy dog, which she secretly believed was a wolf, to protect him. For the following two years, the author and her mother survived as Amsterdam’s inhabitants starved or were shot in the street, witnessed neighbors betray neighbors, scavenged for food, and burned anything they could find to stay warm. Her mother stayed hopeful and joined the resistance, at one point hiding a young Jewish woman. In one of the book’s most harrowing scenes, de Vries watched as Dutch traitors dragged the woman out of hiding and held her mother at gunpoint. As a child who had been taught to love stories, the author tried to think of a happy ending even as she and her mother ate their meager rations and battled malnutrition. One of the more intriguing aspects of this engrossing account is what happened when the family was reunited after the conflict. De Vries clearly and empathetically portrays how a broken-down family and a devastated city attempted to rebuild after the trauma of war. There are many lovely moments and vivid, heart-rending details that bring the author’s narrative to life, including her stark description of the inexplicable coldness she felt toward her father when he first returned. “I had no feelings for this man hugging my mother,” she recounts. “He had no place in the story of my mother’s and my traumatized life.”
A beautifully wrought wartime account; highly recommended for its portrait of the human side of a horrifying period of history.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-658-9
Page Count: 234
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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