Gorky’s paragraphs are stark photographs of horror and hope.
A new, vigorous translation of the first installment of Gorky’s three-volume autobiography, first published in 1914.
Hettlinger, who directs international study programs at Georgetown University and translated The Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin (2007), begins with a swift summary of Gorky’s life (1868–1936), from his impoverished childhood (“Dickensian” is far too feeble a term) to his disturbing late-life pro-Soviet positions. (Gorky is a pen name; he was born Aleksey Peshkov.) The first volume of his autobiography is a stunning work—intense, violent, loving, wrenching, funny and frightening. It begins with the little boy viewing the body of his dead father. Soon after, another horrific scene—his mother giving birth on the floor to a little brother who quickly died—and then his father’s burial in the rain. All of this occurs in the first five pages. Gorky eventually moved in with his grandparents. His grandfather was explosively violent (beatings were routine), while his grandmother was more compassionate and protective. The grandmother was also an engaging storyteller, and Gorky distributes throughout the memoir a number of her affecting tales—verbatim. As his boyhood advanced, his living situation deteriorated, with the family moving into a series of increasingly dilapidated lodgings. Nonetheless, the author found himself drawn to a number of boarders and neighbors. Among the first is “Gypsy,” who helped out with their dyeing business, but soon died after doing a heavy-lifting chore for the family. Another boarder they all called “A Fine Business” (one of the man’s default phrases). Though he was a loner, Gorky befriended him, a relationship the family did not tolerate, and they eventually expelled the man from the house. The volume ends with the death of his mother, and the author, 11 years old and homeless, adrift on poverty’s sluggish river.
Gorky’s paragraphs are stark photographs of horror and hope.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56663-840-1
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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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