An unusual memoir from an unusual point of view, one that at times recalls Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind; readable and...
A Polish aristocrat blessed with a considerable sense of noblesse oblige recalls years of resistance to totalitarian rule.
Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, who died in Rome at the age of 104, in 2002, wrote this rich memoir in 1945 and ’46. She sent parts of it to two English publishers, she writes, who rejected it as “too anti-Russian.” A few years later, she sent it to two more publishers, who rejected it as “too anti-German.” In the context of Cold War politics, the publishers were right. In whatever context, Lanckoronska describes, sometimes with considerable indignation, what life was like in Lvov when the Red Army first invaded it under the partition following the Nazi-Soviet pact; a university professor of art history and specialist in the Renaissance, she clearly considered the newcomers barbarians, easily amused by baby rattles and ignorant of how to use a toilet or shower. By her account, the Soviets were also easily misled, childish as they were, yet not without resources and the ability to induce fear: “I was expecting the NKVD every time the doorbell rang,” she writes. With the arrival of the Nazis, she found a new enemy, and so did they. Captured and sentenced to be executed for working with the resistance, she was spared by odd circumstances: One of her interrogators admitted to her that he had participated in the murder of 25 of her fellow professors, and when she brought the matter to another Nazi officer, her sentence was commuted to imprisonment. At Ravensbrück concentration camp, perhaps improbably, she organized her barracks into a miniature university and taught art history to her fellow inmates—and, summoning up the weight of her nobility, also commanded “a degree of orderliness in collective living to ensure that contact with the Germans was kept to the minimum possible.”
An unusual memoir from an unusual point of view, one that at times recalls Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind; readable and thought-provoking.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-306-81537-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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