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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
