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MARITA

THE SPY WHO LOVED CASTRO

The congeries of stories has its interest, but Lorenz is an indifferent writer. One hopes that the movie version, to which...

“I was stupid and haughty then, a rebel. I sleep alone now”: Lorenz delivers a tale of espionage and deceit, told with rueful candor.

“I didn’t have a happy childhood,” writes the author early on in this update of her 1993 book. That much is already obvious, for a couple of pages earlier, we find her rescued from a German concentration camp, weighing scarcely 45 pounds and unable to stand on her own, one of just a handful of survivors. A year later, an American soldier raped her. Moving with her mother to the U.S. but already certain that she was destined to live a lonely life, Lorenz traveled to Cuba on a ship in the German line where her father was a captain; among her shipmates were a couple of kids from Bremerhaven who would later sneak a tiger cub aboard and who would grow up to become Las Vegas magicians Siegfried and Roy. Not yet 20, Lorenz became one of Fidel Castro’s lovers, his alemanita, “little German girl.” The relationship did not last long, and apparently it was a didactic one, inasmuch as Castro “loved to explain his ideas about agrarian reform” and strike heroic poses. He was capable of flying off the handle, though, outraged when Dwight Eisenhower dispatched Richard Nixon to meet with him so that Eisenhower could sneak in a round of golf. The relationship ended with a pregnant Lorenz suffering a mysterious blackout and waking up without child, treated by a cardiologist and not a gynecologist whom Castro then ordered to be shot—or, at any rate, so she believes. Recruited to assassinate Castro, who blustered, “no one can kill me. No one. Ever,” she took up with Venezuelan strongman Marcos Pérez, got involved with mobsters (including the one who recruited her to kill Castro), and wound up hearing tales about the assassination of JFK and the Watergate burglary.

The congeries of stories has its interest, but Lorenz is an indifferent writer. One hopes that the movie version, to which this ties in, has a little more zing.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-68177-514-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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