One of the more curious World War II entanglements, deftly fashioned.
An American woman’s marriage to a Baltic German noble in 1928 promised a fairy tale but ended in a nightmare of war.
New York City–based author MacRae (co-author: Alliance of Enemies: The Untold Story of the Secret American and German Collaboration to End World War II, 2006) is the daughter of now-deceased Aimée Ellis of Hartford, Connecticut, a wealthy young orphan swept off her feet by a handsome descendant of the Teutonic knights once closely allied with the Russian czars; his elaborate name was Baron Heinrich Alexis Nikolai von Hoyningen-Huene. A polyglot with impeccable manners and education, Heinrich was ambitious as well as irresistible; he and Aimée met while on holiday in France in 1927, when Heinrich was studying international law and economics. Aimée had studied art in New York rather than attend college, and when the couple married the next year, she was several months pregnant. The couple made a home on a big farm in a town about 100 miles outside Berlin, during the painful period of crisis and unemployment in 1930s Germany. Heinrich had the right stuff for the rising new Nazi regime: military lineage, Aryan pedigree, an attachment to the land, and a large, growing family. Although thwarted in his professional ambitions and attempting to settle down as a gentleman farmer, he joined the Nazi party and was mobilized and eventually sent to participate in Operation Barbarossa, where a sniper killed him at Mogilev on July 23, 1941. Aimée, left pregnant with their sixth child, had to soldier on under terrible conditions, fleeing her town when it fell under the Russian sector; she eventually brought her children back to America in several trips. Using her parents’ letters written during this devastating time, MacRae does a fine job of portraying the fear and uncertainty felt by her mother, living in a strange land and torn by loyalties.
One of the more curious World War II entanglements, deftly fashioned.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01583-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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