An astute, absorbing account.
Potent memoir demonstrates the dangers of collecting and dispersing news from behind the Iron Curtain. The book is dedicated to slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya and “the other Russian and Soviet journalists who died under mysterious circumstances after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Daniloff (Journalism/Northeastern Univ.; Two Lives, One Russia, 1988, etc.) began his career as a copy boy for the Washington Post in 1956. Following a brief trip to Moscow in 1959 and stints working in London, Paris and Geneva, the author followed his father’s Russian bloodline and headed back to the country to work as a junior UPI correspondent in 1961. Early on, his expectations about the Soviet Union were debunked by the bureau chief, Henry Shapiro. With an exacting eye for detail and a flair for storytelling that captures the uneasy mood of the times, Daniloff provides captivating anecdotes about his days in Moscow—and many surprises. For example, he recalls the unusually pleasant living conditions, with chauffeurs and imported foods available at the drop of a hat. He also reveals more familiar details about strict censorship, how many contacts were not to be trusted and how important conversations were often conducted outside, away from potential bugs. The author also offers a unique perspective on many key events of the times—including Kennedy’s assassination (Daniloff’s bureau filed a story about Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in Russia not long before he traveled to Dallas) and the space race—all told in front of a vivid backdrop of fear and paranoia. Recollections of Daniloff’s career outside the Soviet Union, such as his stint as a foreign-affairs correspondent on Capitol Hill in the mid ’70s, prove less interesting, but he doesn’t linger too long on these sections. The book reaches a natural conclusion with a reprinted interview from U.S. News & World Report, in which Daniloff muses on how life has changed in the Soviet Union during the 20-year period since he first traveled there, and a chapter that details the chase for information during the Chernobyl disaster.
An astute, absorbing account.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1793-6
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
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