A superficial portrait of Mrs. Gorbachev by a Moscow journalist. Raisa Gorbachev, JÅrgens reports, holds a Ph.D., wears fashionable clothes, and is something of an international media darling. Born in 1932 in Western Siberia, Raisa moved frequently as a child but managed to be an excellent student. She was admitted to the prestigious Moscow State Univ., where she met and married Mikhail Gorbachev. As soon as Mikhail got his degree, the couple was transferred to Stavropol. Culture-loving Raisa missed Moscow, but Stavropol was built around a natural springs, and high-ranking members of the government were frequent visitors, an opportunity for the ambitious couple to make invaluable political connections. Raisa also pursued and obtained her doctorate in sociology, with a thesis on conditions on collective farms. In 1978, the family moved back to Moscow; in 1985, Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary. Among the details of her current life: her schedule (much time spent with her correspondence and with her work at the Soviet Cultural Foundation); her relationship with her family (she dotes on two granddaughters); and, of course, her clothes (according to her dressmaker, Raisa prefers warm, bright colors and is adamant that everything must match). Considering the difficulty of scratching below the surface of official information, JÅrgens has done admirable legwork—but her emphasis on chronology and physical detail offers little indication of Raisa's political bent and a minimum of anecdotes that might shed color or psychological insight. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-72663-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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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