A profoundly disturbing yet ultimately hopeful story of a young man's passage through the heart of darkness. Hasselbach was once considered the golden hope of the neo-Nazi movement in East Germany. Standing over six feet with blue eyes and blond hair, he was the perfect ``Aryan.'' According to Hasselbach, as a young man in the GDR, he was repulsed by the arbitrary power and intimidation of the state. This, along with an ambivalent relationship with his father (a radio announcer considered ``the voice of the GDR'') and an abusive relationship with his stepfather, combined to foster a tremendous feeling of resentment against all symbols of authority, especially the state. Here are some subtle insights into the nature of rebellion and hatred. He came to see the neo-Nazi movement as the only available means to protest against the state. And in that movement, Hasselbach found the solidarity and community missing in both his family and East German society. Some of Hasselbach's revelations are shocking: He writes, for example, that in unified Germany, right-wing terrorists received more lenient treatment than left-wing terrorists; he reports on the well-coordinated international network of neo-Nazis (including the American movement); and, perhaps most provocatively, he notes the connection between neo-Nazism, homosexuality, and the S&M scene. The cast of characters in this real-life bildungsroman is indeed fascinating and horrifying, from sadistic youths to little old ladies demanding more desecrations of Jewish cemeteries. Eventually, Hasselbach recognized ``the psychological horror at the heart of everything we did'' and broke with the movement. Then, hunted down and marked for death by his ex-colleagues for his ``treachery,'' Hasselbach struggled to convince the authorities, the public, and his former enemies on the Left that his conversion was sincere. An ominous look into contemporary German society that reveals a thriving neo-Nazi ideology. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43825-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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