A fascinating anthropology lesson, delivered with the bonus of a dramatic adventure and a happy ending.
In 1944, seven Americans bailed out of their crippled bomber over the Borneo jungle, where local tribespeople hid them from the Japanese.
Heimann (The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life, 1999, etc.) lived in Borneo and speaks Indonesian; few writers could have tracked down this captivating story. She paints a vivid picture of the indigenous people who comfortably inhabited the dense jungle and carried on a flourishing trade with the coast. Despite the title, they were former headhunters. Some were Christian—it depended on the village headman; if he converted, everyone followed—but they retained most of their ancient culture. The Japanese, who had conquered Borneo in 1942, paid little attention to the interior. Starving and sick after only a few days in the jungle, the airmen followed their tribal rescuers to villages where they were cared for. Everyone knew the terrible consequences of protecting downed airmen; the Japanese were searching hard for them and would surely kill not just the Americans but anyone who had helped them. But the risk seemed small in this remote area, and everyone agreed to keep quiet. Learning of the airmen, the local Japanese commander sent armed patrols into the jungle, but native guides led them astray. Aware they were not getting cooperation, the Japanese grew increasingly abusive, finally provoking the tribespeople to kill them. After four months, Australian special forces parachuted in to organize resistance to the Japanese, but two more months passed before a space was cleared for an airfield, and the airmen were able to fly out.
A fascinating anthropology lesson, delivered with the bonus of a dramatic adventure and a happy ending.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101434-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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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