Williams’ work ably demonstrates how a single person can make a great difference.
A crusader for the worldwide ban on landmines tells her amazing, unlikely journey to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.
Out of a regular Everywoman’s life, Vermont native Williams emerged as an effective activist, both in working for the democratic movement in Central America during the 1980s and spearheading the international push for the ban on landmines in the ’90s. The author’s early years were marked by her father’s struggles to find steady work as a salesman and her older brother Steve’s deafness and undiagnosed mental illness. Steve grew increasingly violent and eventually had to be hospitalized, a source of guilt and sadness for Williams. Nonetheless, she managed to get through the University of Vermont during the turbulent late-1960s, and she became increasingly drawn to social upheaval, like the debates over the Vietnam War and racism. Teaching English in Mexico opened her eyes to the enormous disparity in wealth between the rich and poor. After relocating to Washington, D.C., she began to raise awareness about the harmful U.S. intervention in the politics of El Salvador and Nicaragua. From an unhappy stint at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with a focus on Latin America, she longed to get into the trenches and help people, not just theorize about them. In 1991, humanitarian leaders and veterans tapped Williams to build a political movement to ban landmines, which were an active peril in places like Cambodia long after the wars were over. Galvanizing the help of NGOs around the globe and leaders like Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, she organized the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, meeting with officials and speaking at international conferences, all of which culminated in a Mine Ban Treaty hammered out in 1996.
Williams’ work ably demonstrates how a single person can make a great difference.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-520-27025-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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