As startling and memorable as fiction and ripe for film adaptation.
A rare and beautiful love story between a British-American “sailor boy” and a cultured, older Japanese woman who had lived through the World War II years.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Brinkley-Rogers was not yet a U.S. citizen in 1959 when he was serving the beginning of a stint on the USS Shangri-La, anchored off the seaport of Yokosuka, Japan. He was 19 and a wannabe poet when he met the mysterious, incomparable Kaji Yukiko (not her real name) in a bar, the White Rose, catering to the Western service clientele. What ensued was an astonishing relationship during the spring and summer months of 1959. Yukiko, 31, was raised in Manchuria and fled with her family after the war to Japan, where, as a young woman, she became the mistress of some gangsters in Hiroshima and finally escaped to work as a hostess in the White Rose. Full of secrets and wounds, Yukiko was, above all, a very educated woman who seized on the young British-born poet as a like-minded refugee who needed guidance in the literary and cinematic history of her country. During these months of brief meetings and through her exquisite letters, she essentially molded the “sailor boy” into a man capable of sublime thoughts and deep love. Yukiko encouraged Brinkley-Rogers to go to college and become a great poet and writer—and he did, over a long, varied career, finally settling in Arizona in retirement, where he unearthed Yukiko’s letters in 2014 and plunged into a maelstrom of memories that spurred him to address this powerful, moving memoir to “You.” Encapsulated within are Yukiko’s surviving letters, which are suffused with her stunning personality, captured as well in the author’s re-created portrait and dialogue of a woman “knocked down” by life but capable of such passionate feeling that she knocked the boy off his feet.
As startling and memorable as fiction and ripe for film adaptation.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5125-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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