Evidence of a life most extraordinary.
From humble beginnings, Elsie Fox fought most of her adult life to ensure fairness and equality for all, even at the risk of her freedom.
Elsie’s life story is not an archetypal American tale. Born on a remote Montana ranch in 1907, she came from modest beginnings. She barely knew her birth father and lived with a stepfather that tried to sexually molest her–learning at a young age that she could not be beholden to a man to get by in the world. After finishing two years of college, Elsie entered the workforce full time. By the mid-1920s, she found a steady job as a secretary for an advertising agency in Seattle. As an independent woman, she took full advantage of the Jazz Age, going to speakeasies, dating various men and generally having a swell time. When the Great Depression hit, Elsie fumed at life’s unfairness. During one of the “bank holidays,” she found herself at the local library and happened upon The Communist Manifesto–she was radicalized that day, and fervently believed that the communist system was the only workable system. Elsie joined the party, which became her whole world, and her life began anew. She met her husband Ernest, another true believer, at a party meeting. In spite of the danger inherent in being a card-carrying communist, Elsie only stopped her active membership when she realized that the stories of Stalin’s purges weren’t merely capitalist propaganda but the truth. However, she still believed that as an economic system communism was the right path. What sets this biography apart is its subject–still alive as of the book’s 2008 publication, readers learn about modern-day Elsie, not just through the prism of history. They meet a scrappy older woman who is as passionate about her country and the rights of its inhabitants as she has ever been.
Evidence of a life most extraordinary.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-51856-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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