A good complement to Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, Primo Levi’s The Truce, and other accounts of wartime dislocation.
A sharply observed account of war behind the Russian lines from an accidental observer.
Czapski (1896-1993) had the misfortune of being caught between larger armies at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact that divided his country. Thousands of his Polish comrades were executed in the Katyn Forest, an atrocity that he investigated after the war; for his part, he and thousands of other soldiers were sent to the gulag deep inside Russia. When Germany attacked Russia, Czapski and his fellows were freed to join the Allies, but their newly constituted Polish army had to get across the Soviet Union and into territory occupied by friendlier allies. His account of how they made their way to Iran and then to British-occupied Iraq makes up the heart of this book, reporting on things seen and heard along the way as well as on life in the camp: “There was never enough medicine, as in these circumstances even quite large stocks ran out at lightning speed.” Along the way, Soviet agents took away officers of the command, some, it was said, to staff an alternate version of the army for an occupied postwar Poland, but some for other purposes: “Studying Lenin, and one or another, more or less sincere or calculated game with the Bolsheviks, had not been of any help to that dear, lost boy.” The author sees things through an artist’s eyes, sometimes offering arresting images, sometimes simply chronicling the destruction of the Eastern European art world between two brands of totalitarianism (“his synthetic sculptures of cats and birds were worthy of Brancusi,” he writes of one long-forgotten comrade) and its replacement with something else: “I did not see a single picture that wasn’t atrocious or hopelessly mediocre,” he writes of the rising wave of socialist realist art. His reports are astonishing portraits of life in wartime Russia, when many anti-communist Russians welcomed the Nazi invaders and were only too glad to participate in ethnic cleansing.
A good complement to Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, Primo Levi’s The Truce, and other accounts of wartime dislocation.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-256-3
Page Count: 460
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
