A work of such nuance, intelligence, and force that it leaps the bounds of genre.
Stunning contemplation of human relationships, power, and the creation of history through the prism of one woman’s Holocaust survival.
In language that is both marvelously blunt and bitingly sharp, former concentration-camp inmate Kluger (German Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine) recalls her experience growing up in Austria at precisely the right age to have her childhood circumscribed and eventually choked by Viennese anti-Semitism and Hitler's war machine. Placed in Theresienstadt at age 12, she escaped the gas chamber through an accident of fate (an offhand act of kindness from a Nazi) and spent the war shuttling from camp to camp with her mother, who also survived. After a strangely simple escape from one of the final death marches of the war, they immigrated to New York City. Kluger dives in an out of her narrative to consider such topics as her imperfect relationship with her family, her creation of herself as a social being, and the encounters and relationships she's had with Germans since the war. She considers the nature of power and who holds it, extending her line of thought to the crushing sexism of the ’40s and ’50s and making an excellent case that “the Nazi evil was male, not female.” Though the work is relatively slim, it is all meat; Kluger's bristly intellect makes every page hit hard. “This is not the story of a Holocaust victim,” she asserts. In the place of easy sentimentality, we are given a complex testament, one that handily encompasses such phrases as “in a way, I loved Theresienstadt.” Kluger is the farthest thing from an apologist; she merely refuses ever to simplify.
A work of such nuance, intelligence, and force that it leaps the bounds of genre.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55861-271-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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