A mellifluous portrait of a country slowly and painfully pulling itself into the European world.
Swedish-born philanthropist and Granta publisher Rausing offers an intimate look at the devastations of communism in Estonia.
The author’s academic study about a small community in post-Soviet Estonia followed her fieldwork on the Noarootsi peninsula in 1993-1994 (History, Memory and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm, 2004). Here, she returns to the notebooks of that year and her memory for a more sensuous, character-rich portrait of the denuded landscape, ruined economy, and erratic, alcoholic personalities she encountered as a dreamy, lonely observer and teacher. The peninsula’s population had been half Swedish-speaking until the Nazis deported them, and those few thousand left were corralled behind the Soviet military barrier into villages that became “like villages all over the Soviet Union at that particular time: forgotten places sinking into quiet poverty.” Estonia’s independence followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the country had to grapple with the Russian presence and language, depopulation and stalled economy. The collective farm in Pürksi was taken over by a “transitory privatisation commission,” and there was new hope for Swedish return and involvement. The signs of Swedishness made the author feel nostalgic for her own Swedish childhood, and everywhere, she gleaned the sense that time had stopped in Estonia. She unearths fascinating history of this remote area, annexed and depleted by Russia, then Germany, then the Soviet Union; all the while, she taught ninth grade in the local school, tramped through the Baltic forests and interviewed people on the farms. In a talk she made to a group of diplomats visiting the village, she was rebuked for being too candid about the Soviet era; instead, she was told ironically she should have said that “everything is wonderful.”
A mellifluous portrait of a country slowly and painfully pulling itself into the European world.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2217-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
SEEN & HEARD
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