Perhaps the best reader for this book is someone who wants to hike that same trail and is willing to risk being talked out...
A writer, editor, and “inveterate walker” chronicles his monthlong hike in the Alps.
In his first book, Arlan follows the literary path that others have blazed, to great popular success, though he has taken a different route, both geographically and thematically. “Everyone back home knows the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the John Muir Trail,” he writes. “But so few seem to have heard of the Grand Traverse of the Alps….There was something untouched about it that I liked, so I treated it preciously, like a secret.” This alone must have seemed like a good enough reason to undertake the trek and to write a book about it. However, there is little sense of true purpose in this account: no spiritual illumination, no sudden epiphanies, no meditative insight, no transformation—at least none that occurred during the hike or the writing about it. Toward the end, Arlan told a traveler, “I’ve been walking for over three weeks. Not every day, but almost. From Geneva.” When asked why, he responds, “The longer I walk the harder it is to answer the question.” Readers who have encountered such literary journeys will likely knows what happens: the author sacrifices some financial security; he encounters strangers, some of whom are kind; he gets lost; he is more tired than he has ever been; it rains a lot; he survives a dangerous fall. By the time he finished both his journey and his book, he changed a bit, discovering some stamina and inner resources he never knew he possessed. “I am a quitter by nature,” he insists, though the evidence suggests the contrary. “I don’t like pain the way some people do. I have no interest in ‘pushing myself,’ in ‘broadening my horizons’….The path of least resistance has always been my favorite path. So, again, I wonder: what was I doing here?”
Perhaps the best reader for this book is someone who wants to hike that same trail and is willing to risk being talked out of it.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-0975-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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