An awkwardly self-conscious but affecting blend of history and memoir.
Poet and novelist Svoboda (Tin God, 2006, etc.) chronicles her uncle’s odyssey in occupied Japan and unearths some troubling truths about the U.S. military.
The disjointed nature of her memoir may be connected to the reluctance the author admits feeling when her aging father and uncle pestered her to write about the latter’s 18-month stint as an MP at the close of World War II. Svoboda wasn’t particularly close to Uncle Don, and she wasn’t sure that recording his memories of the Nakano stockade outside Tokyo was going to alleviate the depression he’d slipped into in the spring of 2004, as reports on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib began to surface. But then he committed suicide, and the author began listening more intently to the tapes he had sent her. Was there a secret he had been holding inside all these years? Calls to other veterans and a trip to Japan helped Svoboda unravel the story, which she tells in fits and starts, alternating her narrative with excerpts from her uncle’s tapes. In 1946, Nakano was the Eighth Army stockade; it housed military personnel convicted of various crimes and waiting to be shipped home to serve their sentences. Most of the prisoners were black men, who were convicted at far higher rates than white soldiers. (Svoboda discovered that 20 of the 21 reported executions in the Pacific during the war were of African-American soldiers.) At one point, Uncle Don remembered, the head captain announced that the stockade was overcrowded and they would begin executing prisoners sentenced to death. Other vets contacted by the author confirmed that a gallows was built, but records of the actual executions were extremely difficult to track down. In Japan, she doggedly asked residents of Nakano what they remembered, and their replies helped her craft this tortuous look at a desperate, shameful era.
An awkwardly self-conscious but affecting blend of history and memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55597-490-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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