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DISARMED AND DANGEROUS

THE RADICAL LIVES AND TIMES OF DANIEL AND PHILIP BERRIGAN

The story of two brothers and the turmoil, in the Catholic Church and American society, through which they have lived. Philip and Daniel Berrigan gained fame in the 1960s for such dramatic acts of war resistance as pouring blood on draft files; they remain among the best-known Catholic priests in America, even though neither holds positions of significant influence in the Church (Philip married, and left the priesthood in 1973). Journalists Polner (No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran, 1971) and O'Grady (Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor, not reviewed) move beyond the well-known episodes to examine the Berrigan brothers' lives in context: how they came to be relentless foes of war and how their decades of uncompromising protest- -continuing to the present—have affected their country, church, friends, and opponents. The Berrigans' fervor is traced to their working-class Catholic upbringing. Reflective, intellectual Daniel, scorned by a violent and rigid father, joined the Jesuits as a teenager. The more worldly Philip, two years younger, came to the priesthood only after stints as a soldier and college student. Ordained in the 1950s, both were activists virtually from the beginning, progressing by the late 1960s to the point where they were openly at war with their government and with the Church hierarchy. As charismatic teachers and priests, as radicals willing to go to jail for their beliefs, the brothers developed an influence (with Daniel's poetry helping to convey the message) that spread through a generation of peace activists and a Catholic community energized by the liberalizing reforms of Pope John XXIII. A fascinating and well-told story, but not fully satisfying. The source of the passion driving the Berrigans' deeds remains elusive, perhaps through no fault of the authors: The brothers, who confess to near-absolute certainty in their moral choices, harbor few of the doubts that help humanize and illumine most lives. (b&w illustrations, not seen)

Pub Date: Jan. 29, 1997

ISBN: 0-465-03084-X

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996

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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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