A dark, compelling narrative of secrecy and betrayal.
An American journalist trolls the archives of the Hungarian secret police (AVO) to piece together her parents’ imprisonment in and flight from Hungary in the mid-1950s.
Marton (The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, 2006, etc.), who arrived with her family in America in 1957 and grew up in Maryland, discovered only after her parents had died how little she understood about what they had endured. Cultured, educated Jews who had been persecuted by the pro-Nazi Hungarian fascists during World War II, Endre and Ilona Marton, based in Budapest, worked as stringers for the American newswire services and for ten years after the war befriended Americans and others from all over the world. The Martons had become essentially the Hungarian news contact for the rest of the world, and in his reporting Endre used candor and irony to expose the Hungarian autocracy. In fact, AVO officials were keeping close tabs on the couple, aided by informers close to the family, gathering evidence that the Martons were passing secrets to the Americans. In 1955, Endre was thrown into Fo Utca prison, and his wife followed four months later; they were tried and eventually released. During the year or so of their absence, Marton and her sister, uncomprehending, were housed in a foster home. The author’s probing work effectively renders an enormously unsettled, painful time of shifting allegiances and political treachery. She even learned that her parents were suspected of espionage by the CIA and were dogged by Hungarian “watchers” in America intent on luring them back to aid the Cold War cause in Hungary.
A dark, compelling narrative of secrecy and betrayal.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8612-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
