Kofman, a prominent French philosopher, wrote this memoir of her life as a Jewish child under the German occupation in 1994, shortly before she committed suicide. This is a strangely detached recollection of what it was like to be a little girl in France during the traumatic days of the Occupation. Kofman's father, a Hasidic rabbi, was arrested on July 16, 1942, during the first large round-up of French Jews and sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered by a kapo for refusing to work on the Sabbath. The author's recollections begin on the ill-fated day of that round-up and follow her life through her admission to the Sorbonne ten years later at the age of 18. All she retains of her father besides her memories is his fountain pen, which sat on her desk driving her to write her own books: ``Maybe all my books have been the detours required to bring me to write about `that.' '' Kofman and her mother managed to avoid the Nazis, hiding with friends and acquaintances. Eventually, they settled in with a Gentile woman whom Kofman remembers as MÇmÇ. MÇmÇ gradually won the little girl over and at war's end tried to take custody of her. Because Kofman's relationship with her mother was a tortured one, the child carried a considerable weight of ambivalence at this turn of events. Finally, her mother was forced, literally, to kidnap Kofman in order to reclaim her. Kofman retells this story in short vignettes, dispassionately and coolly. The result is all the more powerful for its author's distanced voice. Smock's translation catches the tone quite successfully. At times almost painful to read, a different kind of Holocaust memoir and a book that, with hindsight, suggests the fate that the author had perhaps already chosen for herself.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8032-2731-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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