If you read but one book about the wars in the former Yugoslavia, it should be Hukanovi's harrowing memoir of time spent in the death camps of Bosnia. For those who have found themselves growing unresponsive to the media barrage about the suffering in Bosnia, this is a sure, if painful, antidote. Hukanovi, a Bosnian Muslim journalist from Prijedor, gives us an unforgettable and often unbearable account of his stay in two of the notorious Bosnian Serb camps—Omarska and Manjaa. That Hukanovi has chosen to tell his story in the form of a third-person narrative strengthens its power as both a personal and a collective memoir. The unfolding tragedy of ``Djemo'' and his family rapidly expands to include his fellow prisoners and their communal suffering. Hukanovi movingly conveys the camaraderie born of this hell: ``Would anyone understand the tragedy of these men, linked by fate to this place? Sorrow had darkened their visages and twisted their faces. . . . All the prisoners desperately wanted was to forget all the horror, but the angel of death's carelessness had marked them as witnesses.'' Hukanovi describes sickening acts of violence, ranging from repeated bludgeoning of prisoners to mutilation, torture, and murder. But the savagery and evil of the perpetrators are related in the context of the more reflective tone of Hukanovi's narrative and the acts of kindness that he witnesses. Prisoners look after one another, family members are prepared to sacrifice for one another, and sometimes guards and neighbors aid the victims, at great risk to themselves. Hukanovi does not provide ``answers'' to questions that present themselves (i.e., what accounts for the ``chameleonlike transformation of former friends and acquaintances as they turned into crazed servants of the new authority?''). He does not broach the problems of retribution and justice. Thanks to his courageous memoir, however, readers will approach such questions with fresh, bitter, and necessary light.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-08408-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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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