Heartfelt and most effective when the author’s lens moves from herself to the events beyond her.
Continuing a tale echoed fictionally in her When the Cypress Whispers (2014), Emmy Award–winning writer and producer Corporon relates a story of compassion and collective resistance during World War II, linking it to contemporary events.
A small island near the larger Adriatic island of Corfu, Erikousa served as an unlikely refuge when, as Allied forces advanced, the Nazis rounded up Corfu’s Jewish population and sent them by boat and train to Auschwitz. Perhaps 1 in 10 Jews survived, and that thanks to Christians who hid them away—often in plain sight, telling Jewish children to answer to Christian names: “From now on, your name is Nikos. Do you understand?” said one of the rescuers. “If the soldiers hear the name Daniel, they will know you are Jewish, and they will take you from us.” In a place marked by the old blood libels and ethnic uneasiness, the act was nothing short of heroic. When the Allied soldiers finally arrived later in 1944, many of the remaining Jews began to disperse, finding homes in Palestine and other lands. It took the author years to connect her grandmother’s occasional reminiscences with these larger events, and when, as an adult, she finally did, she began to retrace them, traveling to places such as Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, as well as Erikousa. Corporon’s account can be a little by-the-numbers, a little too self-directed, and a little overly sentimental (“we hugged and we cried in a jumble of English, Greek, and Hebrew, but we understood each other perfectly”), but there is undeniable emotional power in the connections her story helps forge between the living and the dead, some of whom might be otherwise forgotten. The narrative gathers extra force when the author’s nephew is killed by an anti-Semitic gunman in a well-publicized attack in America, prompting her to wonder how removed the Nazi past really is from our own time.
Heartfelt and most effective when the author’s lens moves from herself to the events beyond her.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6111-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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