A well-honed tale of momentous courage and strength.
A Holocaust survivor’s novelistic account of persevering through the horrendous firebombing of her hometown of Hamburg, Germany.
Finely delineated details distinguish this memoir by Hamburg native Ingram, now an artist living in Washington, D.C. At age 8, in the summer of 1943, the author had to grow up fast: With her father coerced into working for the Luftwaffe in Belgium (he was beaten and pressured to divorce his Jewish wife), the author narrowly saved her mother from committing suicide by gassing herself in the apartment’s oven. Her mother was in despair after having received their deportation notice, and she was still reeling from the earlier deportations of her nearest relatives to occupied Russia. Almost immediately, however, the bombs began to drop around the neighborhood, and their apartment building crumbled, forcing mother and daughter to take to the streets to find safety. Here, Ingram inserts some staggering details, such as her mother’s hostile confrontation with the block’s air-raid shelter warden, who refused admittance to Jews and their rejection as well by the church. Having to keep moving through the scene of incendiary horror probably saved them. For the next 18 months, they managed to hide out on a nearby farm owned by a rather objectionable woman, Frau Pimber, who had earlier been entrusted with the care of Ingram’s middle sister, Helga, graced with “Aryan” looks, fair hair and eyes. A closing chapter encapsulates the harrowing survival tale of a youth Ingram met at the Blankenese refugee school who had been nearly worked to death at a slave-labor camp run by the “Cannon King,” Alfried Krupp.
A well-honed tale of momentous courage and strength.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-185-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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