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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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