An engrossing valediction to the tough, imaginative generation forged by the war.
A remarkable memoir of a British lad’s salad days flying bombers against the Nazis and then repeatedly escaping their prison camps.
Tunstall, who died in 2013, suggests that his debut might be the last of its kind: “To the best of my knowledge, there are fewer than half a dozen of us still alive who were in Colditz during the Second World War.” The author grew up simultaneously irreverent and patriotic, entranced by the early spirit of aviation. An RAF officer when war broke out, Tunstall yearned to fly fighters and participated in chaotic raids against German fuel production, piloting the primitive Hampden bomber. After navigational problems forced him to land on a Dutch beach in August 1940, he and his fellow soldiers were captured by German occupiers. The British prisoners maintained a cheerful defiance, following Tunstall’s training to become “as big a bloody nuisance as possible to the enemy” once a prisoner of war. Immediately, Tunstall became preoccupied by the determination to escape: “I had not [yet] learned that the best time to escape is usually as soon as possible.” Recaptured after two cunning attempts involving fabricated uniforms, Tunstall was sent to the notorious “punishment camp” Colditz Castle. Though considered escape-proof, the Nazis erred in consolidating the most recalcitrant Allied POWs in one place. As the war continued, MI9 increasingly aided the British POWs, smuggling in money and forged documents, while Tunstall audaciously sent them intelligence inside split photographs, via letters he was permitted to send to his fiancee. Tunstall portrays a brutal, surreal time with detailed recall and elegant, roguish humor, though he never loses sight of the larger stakes, noting how the Germans “seemed to wallow in the atmosphere of harsh oppression and hopelessness they had created.”
An engrossing valediction to the tough, imaginative generation forged by the war.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1468310559
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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