Effectively employing a subdued tone, Morgan paints a grim picture of hopelessness leading to desperate militancy, reminding...
An unforgettable cautionary narrative of the author’s days as a French combatant and military journalist during the war for Algerian independence.
Biographer and historian Morgan (A Covert Life, 1999, etc.) spent most of his youth in America, but he was also a French citizen, subject to conscription in that nation’s military. One day he was a cub reporter for a newspaper in Worcester, Mass., the next found him a soldier headed to Algeria. It was 1956, not a happy time to be steaming into the Bay of Algiers. Urban terrorism saw its first systematic use there in the campaign of bombings and assassinations by Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN); the French adopted an open display of barbarity in response. Morgan doesn’t pretend that he behaved differently at first: He admits to having beaten a suspected insurgent to death during interrogation. Retelling that dreadful story in a hollow, detached voice, all he can say is that it disfigured him for life. Fortunately, he soon moved to work as a writer for a government newspaper; at this propaganda sheet churning out “perception management,” he could study the Algerian situation without having to participate in human destruction. Morgan knows how to drive a narrative forward, but the story comes wrapped in dispassion, as if the whole situation is too grotesque for him to hold it close. Yet there is incredible firsthand material: the French paratroopers’ methods of torture, the specifics of FLN bombings and the step-by-step dismemberment of the FLN in Algiers. For those whose images of the war and its combatants were shaped by Gillo Pontecorvo’s pro-FLN The Battle of Algiers, the book’s most startling element may be the wrecking job done on the image of Yacef Saadi, the organization’s less-than-heroic leader in the city.
Effectively employing a subdued tone, Morgan paints a grim picture of hopelessness leading to desperate militancy, reminding us that electroshocks and guillotines rarely solve anything.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-085224-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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