Old leopard, new spots, groomed by an acolyte.
If you’re looking for some tyrant-exalting text but for whatever reason are made uncomfortable by the rhetorical (and practical) excesses of, say, Hitler or Mao—well, this is your ticket.
Books by dictators tend to the hortatory: Together you and I can solve the problem; together we’ll lead the world; together we’ll destroy those pesky people next door. Oops. Scratch that last one, for, says The Leader, “All peoples shall have right to existence.” Except, maybe, the people who live in Tel Aviv. Moreover, “The members of Jamahiriyan society”—that is, those who live in sort-of-socialist Libya—“are liberated from any feudalism.” Except, maybe, the slaves who travel across the Libyan Sahara, whose paths are far from The Guide’s green coastline. All of this is the usual cult-of-personality stuff with some curious twists, as when Gaddafi muses on a future that belongs to “the black race,” save that the blacks are “backward” and “sluggish in a climate which is always hot,” and when he assures his gentle readers that “to ignore natural differences between man and woman and mix their roles is . . . hostile to the laws of nature, destructive to human life, and a genuine cause for the wretchedness of human social life.” Once fond of funding people who blew up other people, Gaddafi is now our friend—or so assures French political scientist and hagiographer Jouve, who wonders, “Who is this man who, after making the world tremble with fear, now arouses respect and even praise?” No small amount of that praise comes from the professor himself, who has known Gaddafi for a long time and wants us to know that “his charisma is such that it electrifies his audience,” which makes it all the more tragic that anyone should have ever doubted him.
Old leopard, new spots, groomed by an acolyte.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-84454-129-0
Page Count: 262
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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