Muslims and Christians can live together, Kiser’s poignant narrative asserts, and extremism comes to no good end.
A heart-wrenching tale of French monks slaughtered by Islamic extremists in Algeria.
Not because they were Christians, the author argues early on, but because they refused to leave their Muslim friends. Their murderers didn’t necessarily see it that way, however. The 1996 massacre of the seven monks at the Tibhirine monastery in military-controlled Algeria was part of a radical Islamic wave that killed foreigners of all stripes simply because they weren’t Muslim. Kiser personalizes this tragic episode of recent history. His painstaking characterization of each monk, especially the prior of the monastery, Brother Christian-Marie, makes this an incredibly emotional story. A former officer in the French army who fell in love with Algeria during the country’s war of independence, Brother Christian-Marie raised the eyebrows of other Trappists with his studies of Islam. He was supposed to devote his life to contemplation; instead, he focused on how he might bring his little Christian community closer to the Muslim world surrounding it. Local Muslims loved the monastery in return, viewing the monks as holy men who could be depended upon for food and medical attention. In his debut, technologies broker Kiser builds up the drama leading to the monks’ death with the skill of a novelist. Anti-government rebels who want to purge Algeria of non-Muslim influences visit the monastery but are held off at first by Christian’s combination of piety and brusqueness. As the crisis mounts and other non-Muslims are killed nearby, however, the steadfast monks grow fearful. They band together even more closely and send their youngest member off to France to continue his studies. The reader feels helpless as the kind and harmless brethren await their doom. When the prior and his monks are finally carried away and killed, their pointless deaths illustrate the consequences of vengeful religion.
Muslims and Christians can live together, Kiser’s poignant narrative asserts, and extremism comes to no good end.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-25317-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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