Though the humor is sometimes strained, and the tone dated, the period charm and infectious goodwill more than compensate.
A genial successor to Our Man in Belize (1997) continues Conroy's deliciously unserious memoirs of life in the Foreign Service in 1960s Vienna, where suspected Russian spies apply for visas and the notorious mistress of mobster Bugsy Siegel asks for help.
Conroy frankly admits that his memory has sometimes failed and that names have been changed, but he offers a wryly humorous recollection all the same. His view is not from the lofty perches of the Embassy but the more lowly regions of the Consulate, where he is initially a vice-consul responsible for issuing visas. Vienna is not Belize, and the eating and drinking is so good that he soon regains most of the weight he lost in Central America. Antiques (especially fine Art Nouveau pieces) are cheap, too, and as a pianist there are not only concerts to enjoy but superb pianos to acquire. But it's also the height of the Cold War, don't forget, and applications for visas to the US must be carefully scrutinized (which means Conroy often has to meet with the CIA over lunch to discuss such applicants as the businessman who claims he was only wearing a Red Army uniform in a photograph in his file to impress his girlfriend). The author describes colorful colleagues like Theo (the dipso legal adviser who invaded Stalingrad on a bicycle) and relates the various odd jobs that fell his way (such as ensuring that an elderly American who wanted to be a ballet dancer got his monthly remittance, and helping an old woman from Brooklyn escape from a Budapest man she was convinced was slicing flesh off her feet). But after dealing with this rich mix of cons, innocents, and lost souls, Conroy was eventually transferred to Washington, where he learned to tangle with an often obtuse State Department and some devious official foreign visitors.
Though the humor is sometimes strained, and the tone dated, the period charm and infectious goodwill more than compensate.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26493-3
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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