Plaintive but philosophically provocative.
An elegiac remembrance of an Armenian’s flight from war and the cruel aftermath of a culture ravaged.
This is a family affair narrated by Raphael Gianighian and his son Vartan, who edited the work. In 1915, Raphael was forced to flee his native district, Khodorchur, after the Turks attempted to exterminate the Christian Armenians. Raphael captures his travails in about 100 pages, the first third of this remembrance. His survival against grim odds was astonishing and was partly due to his grandfather’s bravery and guile and partly due to the assistance provided by American relief organizations that mobilized to help displaced Armenians. Raphael’s account is harrowing, written in a simple but powerful hand: “We see headless, decomposing bodies floating on the Tohma River. The guards stop us in front of a big inn. We wait for our fellow countrymen to arrive. The site is crowded. The river flows below the inn, and in the front space, blood stains the tables and benches and walnut trunks. Old men with long beards smoke narghilé and drink coffee. The butchers have cut off the Armenians’ heads, stuck them on the tree trunks, and thrown the corpses into the river.” Written in the third person, the second third of the book is a pastiche of perspectives, including writings from Raphael and some of his fellow travelers, all woven together by Vartan. In this section, Raphael, after having settled in Italy, returns to Khodorchur to bear witness to the sad remnants of the village he once called home. Khodorchur is a testament not only to a victimized people, but to a culture all but vanished from the Earth. The third section of the book, written in the first person by Vartan, recounts his own emotionally tumultuous visit to Khodorchur in an attempt to learn more about his father, his family, and the ethnic heritage denied him. His own experience mirrors his father’s return from exile, marked by profound sorrow and personal transformation. This is an affecting tale, told by both father and son, as historically edifying as it is excruciating.
Plaintive but philosophically provocative.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500692551
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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