of Vautrin’s life convey her stature far better than this heartfelt but somewhat pedestrian account.
An account of the remarkable courage of an American missionary who lived through the rape of Nanking, by award-winning
Chinese academic Hu (History/National Univ. of Taiwan). Vautrin grew up in Illinois, joined the Foreign Christian Missionary Society, and was sent to China in 1912. In 1919, she was appointed president of Ginling College, a women's institution in Nanking, where she was to live for the rest of her stay in China. When war broke out in 1937 with the Japanese invasion of China, Vautrin refused to leave the city. The events that followed are notorious as among the greatest war crimes of the 20th century: according to the International Military Tribunal an estimated 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were murdered in Nanking and its surroundings; other estimates go as high as 300,000. Some 80,000 women were raped, and prisoners were used for medical experiments and bayonet practice. In the midst of this horror, Vautrin, using her authority as the American head of a US institution, was able to give some measure of protection to 10,000 women and their families in accommodations designed for a fraction of that number. For months she had to be alert, racing from one end of the campus to the next, to prevent violence by Japanese soldiers. She herself was constantly threatened. While immersed in this "hell on earth," she had to deal with the huge logistical problems of feeding and looking after her charges. Those who survived described her as a "Goddess of Mercy." Vautrin, for her part, thought she had failed in her life’s work. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1940 and returned to the US, where she took her own life in 1941. Hu was faced with the classic difficulty of portraying the true dimensions of powerful virtue: Unfortunately, the bare facts
of Vautrin’s life convey her stature far better than this heartfelt but somewhat pedestrian account.Pub Date: March 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-8093-2303-6
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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