A fascinating story in an occasionally frustrating recounting.
How does one weigh past evils against future good deeds? This is the central question of this at times compelling, at times vexing biographical sketch.
Dr. Anne Marie Spoerry (1918-1999) spent 50 years in East Africa, primarily in Kenya, serving local people. She was a “flying doctor” who, utilizing her pilot’s license and a rickety but reliable old plane, traveled to remote areas to provide much-needed health care to generations of Kenyans. “Mama Daktari” was a legend to thousands. But she also held deep secrets. During World War II, Spoerry had worked in the French Resistance against the Nazis; when she was caught, she ended up at the notorious Ravensbrück camp. Subsequently, she kept her war experiences almost wholly to herself, in part because she surely suffered, but also because while there, she compromised—as any of us might have—and utilized access to a likely paramour, as well as her medical experience, to better position herself. In so doing, she tortured and killed other prisoners and sent others to their deaths. Heminway (Yonder: A Place in Montana, 2000, etc.), a writer and documentary filmmaker who has won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards, spends a great deal of time investigating Spoerry’s actions at Ravensbrück though surprisingly little exploring how to weigh them in light of her unquestionably virtuous deeds for the final decades of her life. Thus, the cranky white savior–type doctor (with awful bedside manner) who may have also collaborated with the Nazis becomes both hero and villain, as the author fails to interrogate the meaning of these contradictions. Furthermore, Heminway refers throughout to “Africa,” as if Africa the continent is an undifferentiated mass. He is telling a story almost exclusively based in Kenya, and yet he discusses Africa and Africans as if this massive continent of 1.2 billion people is a single country.
A fascinating story in an occasionally frustrating recounting.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3297-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
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