A penniless Jewish emigrant from Nazi Germany finds wealth and happiness in the US. Founder of the Bettmann Archive, perhaps the world's best-known pictorial library, Bettmann knows where his bread is buttered. To illustrate this breezy autobiography, which runs from his birth in 1903 Leipzig to his recent appointment as curator of rare books at Florida Atlantic University, the author picked copious choice examples from his gigantic collection. With the trademark Bettmann penchant for the unusual, the pictures depict everything from Bach's skull to a toenail-cutting machine, and sometimes bear only a distant relation to the text. No matter: Every one is a gem. The prose suffers by comparison, although Bettmann does catch the fairy-tale atmosphere of N.Y.C. immigrant life in the Depression, and has some fascinating memories of the land he left behind (attending a university course taught by Edmund Husserl: ``an absent-minded, goateed Jewish man entered the class, affixed his pince-nez, and began reading in an almost inaudible voice from a prepared text''). Similar little anecdotes enliven Bettmann's tale of how he escaped the Nazis (``some kind of nut,'' one goon muttered when Bettmann crossed the border with his collection stashed in two trunks); married ``a genuine, vital American woman''; and founded the Archive through luck and, as he admits, workaholism. Famous people do walk-throughs (Edward Steichen; Barbara Tuchman; Alfred Kinsey, who buys a hot painting from Bettmann for his Institute for Sex Research). Bettmann describes the pix he never found (a portrait of Daniel Fahrenheit, inventor of the thermometer scale; a painting of Spinoza grinding lenses) and some of his peculiar assignments (cable from Mott: ``Send everything you've got on apples''). Meanwhile, the eye keeps returning to those fabulous pictures (221 b&w).
Pub Date: Dec. 31, 1992
ISBN: 0-8130-1153-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. Press of Florida
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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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