Peter Mayle meets Foreign Affairs in this double-edged tale of reconstruction in post-Communist Poland. Like many other Poles, young Sikorski (Dust of the Saints: A Journey Through War-Torn Afghanistan, 1990) found himself abroad (in England) when martial law was declared in Poland in 1981. But his life in exile, unlike most, was unusually charmed. By the time he returned to Poland in his late 20s, he was an Oxford-educated author and journalist with experience in Africa and Afghanistan. Active in the Solidarity-led government, he also took on the considerable task of reclaiming and restoring his family's old manor house, known as a dworek. ``A dworek is not just a nice house to live in, but a calling,'' writes Sikorski with characteristic intensity and passion. Not only was there the challenge and pleasure of restoring the ruined shell of a once-beautiful building, but there was the history of the environs (and, by extension, of Poland itself) to explore through the process. Sikorski quite clearly means for the restoration to serve as a metaphor for post-Communist Poland's active and often confusing search for a new identity and purpose. He interweaves his descriptions of the reconstruction of the house with his family's history and the turbulent history of modern Poland. Sikorski brings an appealingly dry wit to his observations about post-Communist politics but skimps on the more tangible aspects of reconstructing the dworek (i.e., finances). The house is located in Pomerania, a region that has shifted between German and Polish control, and relations between Poles and Germans loom large in these stories. But Sikorski's presentation of the German-Polish problem manages to diminish or neglect the Jewish aspect of Poland's past. His otherwise moving account of Polish suffering under the Nazis would have been better balanced if placed within the larger picture of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Full Circle is an engagingly written and enlightening look at contemporary Poland and its zeitgeist. (10 b&w photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81102-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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