A memorable read that captures the hopefulness of falling in love and traces its sad trajectory into quiet terror amid the...
A poetic and painful debut memoir about a young marriage filled with idealism and adventure that unravels under the pressure of daily life in Israel during the first Gulf War.
Nielsen (Memoir Writing/New York Univ.) grows weary when people assume her marriage ended because of differences over religion, nationality and culture; she asserts that she and her husband were prepared for those challenges. Nielsen, who was raised in Connecticut by her Christian Scientists parents, and Aviv, an Israeli atheist with Romanian-born parents, met in Peru. Nielsen was traveling after quitting her reporting job in Buenos Aires, Aviv doing the same after completing his mandatory military service. The two reunited in New York, where they continued to develop a loving relationship. When Aviv proposed to her, Nielsen moved to Israel to get to know his family and country during the engagement while he finished school and she worked on a kibbutz; they planned to return to New York for the wedding and for Nielsen to start graduate school. Missile attacks from Iraq, however, were not part of the plan. The threat of chemical and biological warfare made them quick experts on assembling gas masks and preparing atropine injectors. Aviv buried himself in his work, while Nielsen’s loneliness was exacerbated by her new in-laws’ stoic approach to war. Certain passages and anecdotes feel forced into the main narrative, and Nielsen indulges in explaining the meaning of her memoir in the final chapter, but on the whole her prose is appealing and adept.
A memorable read that captures the hopefulness of falling in love and traces its sad trajectory into quiet terror amid the chaos of war and its aftermath.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3537-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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