A brief, affecting Gallic story of an enduring marriage that ended in senseless tragedy.
A deeply felt memoir from the wife of a cartoonist killed in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack.
One winter Wednesday in Paris, French journalist Wolinski was swiftly and savagely widowed after 47 years of marriage. Her husband was the well-known Georges Wolinski (1934-2015), the oldest cartoonist on the staff of the renowned satirical newspaper. On Jan. 7, Georges, leaving their apartment, called out to his wife, “darling, I’m going to Charlie.” Soon, he and 11 others were murdered by a pair of terrorist brothers to redress the publication’s cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. Relying on eyewitnesses, social media, and her memory, the author writes passionately of the assault and the days following. Early on, she wasn’t alerted to the killings. As the scene filled with police, reporters, and politicians, she wondered why Georges didn’t call to arrange a meeting that afternoon to view an apartment. She learned of the attack from a sympathetic taxi driver and of the death of her husband by a phone call from her son-in-law. Charlie Hebdo had been threatened before, but it was ill-equipped, even a bit lax, in its defense. Wolinski has little sympathy for the police, who, at union insistence, had reduced surveillance. The first responders consisted of two sparsely armed policemen on bicycles. Authorities did not call to inform her and did not tell her where her husband’s remains were taken. In a final affront, his name was misspelled on a memorial plaque at the offices. Ultimately, the author was able to draw solace from the many loving Post-it notes her husband habitually left for her throughout their apartment. No more than a day’s reading, Wolinski’s moving story will resonate with anyone who has unexpectedly lost a loved one.
A brief, affecting Gallic story of an enduring marriage that ended in senseless tragedy.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5489-8
Page Count: 136
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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