A raw, troubling inquiry into the deep roots of hatred and the physical and moral starvation that made war inevitable.
An Austrian-born woman confronts her family’s past.
Growing up in Austria in the 1950s, Day (writing as Elizabeth O’Neill: Nine and a Half Weeks, 1978) was given textbooks with blank labels glued on the cover, hiding swastikas. No one talked about the war. As a high school exchange student in America, though, Day began to watch—and binge on—war movies, learning for the first time what the world thought about her countrymen. Her parents refused to answer her questions; she learned only that both had been members of the Nazi Party but not why they joined or what role her father, a policeman, played. Right after high school, Day married and moved to America, where she became obsessed with history. After World War I, Austria, she learned, was destitute: “The near-starvation of the last war years and the years after the collapse, the continuing scarcity of food, of coal, of living accommodations, of jobs, life savings melting in the inflation and no improvement in sight. One’s helplessness in the face of it all.” Germany recovered more quickly, to the envy of Austrians, and in both nations, vindictiveness grew. In addition, anti-Semitism was endemic. Day recognized it in herself, a feeling so indelible that she could not imagine how it began. “The legacy of the Holocaust has tarnished me beyond all methods of cleansing,” she writes. “I felt: I hate the guts of every Jew alive.” With a job in publishing, Day knew and befriended many Jews, but she could not deny her revulsion at the German word Jude that, to her, meant “contemptible.” Day died in 2011; this memoir, here reissued in paperback, first appeared in 1980.
A raw, troubling inquiry into the deep roots of hatred and the physical and moral starvation that made war inevitable.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231000-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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