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INSIDE OF TIME

MY JOURNEY FROM ALASKA TO ISRAEL

Witness to worlds in the midst of radical change, the author gives a commonplace appeal to the momentous events with her...

Intriguing historical circumstances and a big heart distinguish this second memoir by Gruber (Ahead of Time, 1991, etc.), onetime official in the FDR Administration and a Mideast correspondent during the postwar years that saw the birth of Israel.

Gruber begins in 1941, when Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes asked her to serve as his field representative in Alaska. That not-yet state commands a large portion of Gruber’s text, as she recalls traveling about the wilderness and taking her own measure of it, “making a study of how to open Alaska to homesteaders”—which sounds a bit Manifest Destiny–ish and in fact is. She also details at length her experiences covering the plight of displaced Jews immediately following WWII, which prompted her to go head-to-head with anti-Semites in the US Department of State, with General George Patton, and with the British colonial administration. Gruber has lost some of the good journalist's knack for compression: snips of dialogue lead nowhere, and repetition rather than forceful imagery drives home her points. Her prose can be windy to the point of storm warning, the off-color jokes are jarringly antiquated, and comments like “In July 1941, Ion Antonescu, Romania's fascist dictator, began murdering his Jews” are rather mortifying. But her tales of being in harm's way can also display real power, whether the danger is physical—slogging through backcountry Alaska, dodging Nazis to spirit away refugees—or emotional, as when she reports on camps for displaced Jews in Germany, Cyprus, and even Israel: “Camps are never good for human beings. People deteriorate amid the abnormality of camp life.” No doubt the Palestinians would agree, yet the usually empathetic Gruber is mute on their predicament.

Witness to worlds in the midst of radical change, the author gives a commonplace appeal to the momentous events with her ingenuous storytelling.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-7867-1083-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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