However long the odds on such a conjunction, two biographies of Snow are scheduled for publication in June, Though S. Bernard Thomas's Season of High Adventure (see page 519) is more complete, Farnsworth is livelier and offers greater detailed about the geopolitical forces convulsing Asia during Snow's sojourn there. Farnsworth, professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (archival home to Snow's voluminous papers), provides no more particulars than absolutely necessary to get the venturesome midwesterner to the Orient. After reaching Shanghai at age 23 in 1928, Snow was able to support himself as a freelancer for Western newspapers and periodicals. An observant reporter and fiercely independent thinker who had no use for imperialism of any stripe, Snow was among the first to appreciate the scope of Japanese aggression in mainland China. No friend of the repressive Chiang Kai-shek regime, he sought and in 1936 (with help from Sun Yat-sen's widow) finally secured access to the Communist forces bottled up in the country's remote Northeast. His account of their revolution, Red Star Over China (1937), earned him considerable fame. There were other books (notably Battle for Asia, which not only probed the complexities of a united Communist/Nationalist front against the Japanese but also challenged readers to face the questions colonialism posed for democracy on the eve of Pearl Harbor) and projects (including personal involvement in the launching of industrial cooperatives) before Snow left the Middle Kingdom early in 1941. Thereafter, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and other factors caused the foreign correspondent's own star to fade, and Farnsworth accords the years after China only once-over-lightly attention. A resonant briefing on an American who bore eloquent witness to a turning point in Asian history. (12 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8262-1060-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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