A moving story of characters, arresting to begin with, who rise to acts of extreme courage.
The romantic history of French journalist Yung-de Prévaux’s parents—both of whom died in the French Resistance and about whom Yung-de Prévaux knew nothing until she was 24—written with captivating directness, passion, and formality.
Yung-de Prévaux was a student in Paris in 1966 when she learned by chance that her real parents were Jacques and Lotka de Prévaux. Here, she pulls together what pieces of their lives she can, a task made all the more difficult as her father’s profoundly religious family had disowned him when he divorced his wife to marry Lotka, a Jewish woman from Poland whose family died in the camps. But her picture is fairly complete and sparklingly written. Jacques was an airship pilot and a naval officer in the French navy—an admiral, at that—a womanizer equally content in his youth to be playing Chopin on the piano or reclining in an opium den when he was stationed in the Far East. Yung-de Prévaux cuts her father a good deal of slack (of his wandering ways during his first marriage: “Jacques led an extensive and complicated love life, not through libertinage but from the need to exercise his powers of seduction”), but he emerges as a flawed if alluring character deeply involved in what was a remarkable moment in history. Lotka made her way to Paris from southern Poland, became a fashion model, and moved with a fast, artistic crowd. They met, sparks flew, he divorced, his family withdrew, and they married. Shortly thereafter, war broke out in France, and the Prévauxs joined the F2 branch of the Resistance, operating in the south of the country: she as a courier and he in intelligence. They were captured late in the war, tortured but revealed nothing, and shot days before the liberation of Lyon.
A moving story of characters, arresting to begin with, who rise to acts of extreme courage.Pub Date: April 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0194-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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