Frank and affecting, a remarkable piece of war literature.
Complex, closely observed diary by a woman living in conquered Berlin at the end of WWII.
A professional journalist and editor who died in 2001, the author documents with immediacy her struggle to survive at the closing stages of the war. Originally published in 1953, the diary chronicles in the present tense the lives of Germans in the spring of 1945 as 1.5 million Soviet soldiers advance through bombed-out Berlin. The first interactions are relatively calm. Russians happily ride stolen bicycles through the streets; the author hears and sees their “friendly voices, good-natured faces.” This period quickly ends with mass rape of German women, including the diarist. After describing in detail the psychological and physical toll of rape, Anonymous decides, “I’m alive, aren’t I? Life goes on!” Many women adopt gallows humor, saying, “Better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead.” Using a strategy adopted by many, the author seduces a high-ranking Russian officer: “I have to find a single wolf to keep away the pack,” she explains. Several of these arrangements not only provide her with some protection, but also much-needed food and supplies. Anonymous writes of her neighbors’ collective shame about their complicity with Nazism and quotes a German refugee, brutalized at the Czech border, who says wearily, “We can’t complain. We brought it on ourselves.” But she also notes how quickly many of her compatriots pull a hollow about-face and reject Hitler. A tireless observer, she pinpoints wartime relationships and small revealing scenes: the eeriness of vanished sparrows, the progress of gardeners tending their plots between bombings, a boy dreamily asking his mother if they can eat an emaciated horse, Berliners repeating with scornful irony the prewar propaganda catchphrase, “For all of this we thank the Führer.”
Frank and affecting, a remarkable piece of war literature.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7540-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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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