Of modest interest to students of world politics and fans of true crime. Then again, given the Talk Miramax imprimatur, they...
A careful, if sometimes plodding, reconstruction of the regicide/parricide/suicide that captured the world’s attention for a moment or two last summer.
British journalist and travel-writer Gregson makes much of a centuries-old prophecy that promised the Shah dynasty of Nepal would be rubbed out in its tenth generation. Just that happened when, in the midst of a raging war between the royal army and indigenous Maoist guerrillas, Crown Prince Dipendra donned camouflage, strapped on machine guns, and slaughtered his parents and siblings. He did so, it appears, out of disappointment that his mother and father disapproved of his intention to marry a commoner and had threatened to cut off his allowance. A fat boy who loved pizza, Gregson tells us, Dipendra hated failure and let few obstacles stand in his way; he was also notoriously fond of drugs and drink, which he justified as necessary to “de-stress,” and showed signs of mental illness. Warned by an English tutor that his boy was about to pop, King Birendra chose to believe that Dipendra would come around—a fatal error, as the nation would discover. Gregson sometimes lays on the details a little thick: “[The Queen’s] skull was blown apart and most of her brains scattered over a wide area. Fragments of brain tissue, jawbone, and teeth, the red tika she had placed on her forehead, her ear-pins and broken red glass bangles, were found in different places around where she fell.” At the same time, his prose is strangely lackluster, given the dramatic events he depicts. Still, Gregson does a good job of making comprehensible odd events in a distant land and explaining their implications, including the possible loss of Nepal to the very Maoists the king was fighting.
Of modest interest to students of world politics and fans of true crime. Then again, given the Talk Miramax imprimatur, they might want to wait for the movie.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6878-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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