Despite its flaws, this is a moving tale nobly brought to light.
A heartrending memoir that tells the story of life in the internment camps of World War II Indonesia.
Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese military forces swept through Indonesia–then made up of Dutch colonies–in an attempt to secure control over the islands of Southeast Asia. Intoning the racist slogan “Asia for Asians,” the invaders set to punishing members of the European cultural and economic elite living there, seizing land and property and sending many of the islands’ Dutch inhabitants to prison camps. As a child, Wiederhold–the son of a Dutch factory manager in Java–suffered just this fate, and here he tells of his time in three internment facilities. Conditions grew worse as he and members of his family were shuffled from camp to camp, with Wiederhold witnessing unspeakable horrors, from deadly malnutrition to dehumanizing disease to torture and death. The author offers a sober assessment of the increasingly dreadful environment of the camps. His evocations of their dangers are poignant and often painful, but they are never hyperbolic. It is clear that he wishes only to accurately describe the violence of the camps, and he scrupulously avoids exploiting such violence for dramatic (or melodramatic) ends. Outside of the Netherlands, few have heard of Japan’s wartime brutality in Indonesia, and Wiederhold considers it a duty to tell his story to the English-speaking world. Therefore, it is somewhat surprising that he devotes less than half his book to recounting his time in the camps. He devotes fully three of its five movements to family history, descriptions of life before the war and details on his eventual emigration to the U.S. These sections are instructive and eloquently written, but their very length has the effect of diluting the power of the harrowing story whose retelling is Wiederhold’s central aim.
Despite its flaws, this is a moving tale nobly brought to light.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-425726-10-2
Page Count: 301
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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