A beautiful, gracious act of connection with a man who kept his secrets. (8 b&w photos, not seen)
Journalist and novelist Richardson (In the Little World, 2001, etc.) tries to understand what his abstracted, distant father faced as a high-ranking CIA officer.
John Richardson Sr. was an idealist: a man who loved great literature, Thomas Jefferson, and democracy, a Quaker who undertook dangerous missions during WWII. He also witnessed Tito’s slaughter of Germans and Croats, as well as Stalin’s pause outside Warsaw while the Germans went about their dirty work in the city; these experiences led him to join the fight to thwart communism. As he shifted from the OSS to the fledgling CIA, John Sr. essentially became a classified secret himself, and John Jr. lost his father, who was out of the loop. The author pores over all the evidence he can find concerning his father’s role in various authoritarian outposts, endeavoring to make sense of an honorable man who helped facilitate a foreign policy that increasingly relied on despots and thugs. He tracks Dad from Greece to the Philippines, Vietnam during the cheery days of Diem and Nhu and strategic hamlets, and finally to Seoul under the thumb of the grim Park Chung Hee. Richardson never learns exactly what his father did, but he does artfully draw the family’s home life in all its stress, distance, and disconnect. John Jr. and his sister were very much a part of the counterculture; their behavior could easily rub their father the wrong way. John Sr. was patient and decent—he railed against the ugly Americans—but he held the conviction that “we have to support vicious dictators because an authoritarian government can evolve but a totalitarian government can only be opposed from the outside.” He took his authoritarian poison, Richardson notes, and “stored up the raw material for a lifetime of regrets.”
A beautiful, gracious act of connection with a man who kept his secrets. (8 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-051035-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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