A distinguished novelist’s (The Buru Quartet: House of Glass, 1996, etc.) painful remembrances of the 14 years he spent in an Indonesian prison work camp. Toer acknowledges the somewhat fragmented nature of his memoir—much of it was pieced together from surviving notes that had been smuggled out of the labor camp at great personal risk. For four years, he was forbidden from writing at all, and even when permission was officially granted, the penalty for offending any prison official would certainly have been severe. Toer was arrested along with tens of thousands of other Indonesian citizens after the military takeover which ousted President Sukarno in 1965. As a category B political prisoner (too dangerous to be freed, but not threat enough for immediate execution), he was exiled to a prison work camp on Buru, an undeveloped island in the Moluccas. His story describes the difficulties faced by himself and his fellow prisoners: they were forced to clear roads to the interior of the island using only their hands, to till the hard-packed arid soil of the fields with hand hoes, to build rice paddies in sweltering swamps without proper clothing. Prisoners were punished frequently for unclear infractions—beaten with rifle butts and bamboo canes. They suffered starvation and malnutrition, and were reduced to eating snakes, rats, and lizards for survival. Corrupt guards and officials stole the prisoners— food or demanded tribute in the form of precious chickens and eggs. In addition to serving as witness to the fate of his fellow prisoners, Toer describes the process by which one writes oneself back from the incoherence of nearly total oppression. He describes his writing as a way of using narrative to restore his integrity as a human being—he then attempts to extend this benefit to his fellow victims. The chilling true story behind much of the acclaimed fiction of Toer.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7868-6416-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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