The rather unorthodox biography of Helen Bamber, a British woman who has devoted her life to supporting the welfare of international victims of torture. In his first book, Belton, an editor at Granta Books, begins Bamber’s story by describing the plight of the Northumberland Fusiliers, a machine-gun battalion captured at the fall of Singapore in 1942. The tremendous physical and emotional trauma suffered by the veterans during the war was heightened upon their return by the sense that British society was unable to acknowledge their suffering. Years later, it was Bamber who began the healing process by listening to the men describe their experiences. What makes this biography unique is that Belton himself employs this listening tactic: Throughout much of the book, he fills in the outline of Bamber’s life with accounts by those who have come into contact with her, as well as with historical chronicles of events through which she lived. Bamber’s presence in the work is that of a witness who is able to retain a sense of humanity in the face of absolute human degradation by allowing victims of torture to give voice to whatever has befallen them. Evidently, her entire career was shaped by her experience as a member of the Jewish Relief Unit sent to the concentration camp at Belsen to coordinate aid to emancipated Jews shortly after WWII. There she gained an understanding of the power of testimony to induce healing. After almost 20 years as a leader in Amnesty International, Bamber was appointed director of the Medical Foundation for the Treatment of Victims of Torture, where, now in her 70s, she continues to carry on her work. A complicated tangle of bleak historical moments and traumatic personal narratives, surprisingly converging into the life story of a compassionate and highly moral woman.
Pub Date: April 16, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40100-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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