Aciman (French Literature/Princeton) delivers a clear- eyed eulogy of a lost past and a family in decline. Aciman's Jewish-Turkish-Italian family came to Alexandria, Egypt, in 1905, long before young AndrÇ was born. There they lived in highly leveraged splendor as Aciman's great-aunts and -uncles—particularly Great-uncle Vili, the flamboyant youngest brother—made and lost fortunes, despised the Arab natives, and survived two world wars. The family rose to, and fell from, the heights of government and European-Egyptian society, and by the late 1960s the entire clan had either died, emigrated, or been expelled from their adoptive home. Aciman begins his memoir in the recent past, with a visit to Great-uncle Vili, the first of the family to emigrate. The octogenarian had achieved his goal of becoming a genteel—and gentile— Englishman: Because of his service to the British during WW II—all the while remaining faithful to Italian Fascism—he was granted a country estate in Surrey, where he lived out his life as Dr. H.M. Spingarn. Vili's sister Esther, Aciman's grandmother and one of the last to leave Egypt, was a mazmazelle, a European grande dame who dined at Alexandria's Sporting Club, fingered produce in the market, and bargained mercilessly with the local merchants. She also smuggled money out of Egypt for years before she was expelled along with her sister Elsa and Aciman and his parents. Aciman creates a romantic portrait of a bygone time without idealizing his colorful ancestors. Much of their interest is, in fact, in their pettiness, spitefulness, and bigotry. They were simultaneously assimilated, anti-Semitic, and practicing Jews; masters of their Egyptian servants and ``Dogs of the Arabs.'' Aciman's father was an unrepentant philanderer, his deaf mother a source of shame. He himself appears mainly as observer of the group's deterioration. A skillful portrayal of an extraordinary clan.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-22833-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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