The unremarkable record of a college dean's six-and-a-half years as a hostage of the Islamic Jihad in Beirut. Husband and wife Tom and Jean Sutherland, he the dean of agriculture and she an English teacher at the American University of Beirut, have turned Tom's 2,354-day hostage ordeal into a book to be read at your own risk. Tom is no Terry Anderson or Terry Waite (his longtime roommates in captivity), and At Your Own Risk offers neither the human nor the religious and political insights to compete with the more eloquent books covering the identical experience. The Sutherlands' suffering is real enough, but they come off as cool, petty, and humorless. They don't explain why Tom ignored warnings from the US government and accepted an administrative post at a campus in a virtual war zone, crawling with members of several Palestinian guerrilla groups with whom he seems at times to sympathize. But the dean is even a mediocre anti- imperialist. Deep in captivity, when we seek his profound ruminations about life, freedom, love, and war, we learn that Sutherland preferred the enhanced salary and prestige that American University offered over Colorado State University. In captivity, he is ``terribly worried about the impact of this whole thing on my career.'' While Jean is tirelessly meeting with government officials and attending yellow-ribbon-tying ceremonies for Tom, he is bemoaning his inferior chess game and his inability to read as well as Terry Anderson. The boredom is breached when the hostages get a radio, and there is a rare moment of emotion when Sutherland hears a birthday greeting from his family. Hungrier for attention than an Oprah guest, the finally freed Sutherland gushes, ``What an ovation! . . . it made up for all those years.'' Readers are likely to be embarrassed by the closing crescendo of self-congratulation.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55591-255-9
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Fulcrum
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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