An invaluable complement to an immortal testimony.
Anne Frank, before and after the diary, with many new details and a fresh, welcome perspective.
In this updated edition of her superb 1998 biography, Müller (Alice's Piano: The Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, 2012) adds immeasurably to a well-known story, expanding on what the precocious young Anne Frank either didn’t say or didn’t know. Starting well before Anne’s birth, the author shows how her father, Otto Frank, established successful businesses selling fruit extracts and wholesale goods and, with his wife Edith, managed for a while to raise a family despite the growing Nazi threat. Otto could deal with the Wehrmacht by supplying goods to the Nazis (he hardly had any choice) and by trying to “Aryanize” his businesses. Of course, it couldn’t last, as the family would be forced to flee first to Amsterdam and then into the secret annex over one of Otto's businesses. They weren’t alone; some 20,000 to 30,000 Jews in Holland “saw going into hiding as their only alternative to deportation." Müller illuminates the shadows of Anne’s diary, particularly in casting the Franks’ loveless arranged marriage, which Anne accurately saw through, in a sympathetic and understanding light. She adds dimension to Anne’s picture of Edith, as well; the woman her daughter depicted as stern and cold was also trying desperately not to give in to despair. Müller likewise tells the full story behind Anne’s roommate, Fritz Pfeffer. The stiff-necked, middle-aged doctor whom Anne referred to as “Dussel” (Dutch for “dope”) also had no family support and feared for the safety of his fiancee and a son by a former marriage. Müller assesses Anne’s shifting moods, growing sexual awareness and her dual nature: the impish extrovert and the deeply private young writer. She also assiduously researches the details of Anne’s final days, as well as the fates of everyone else.
An invaluable complement to an immortal testimony.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8731-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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