A skillful and illuminating way of presenting, to wonderful effect, the cultural, political, and personal history of a year...
Among innumerable turning points in history, 1947, just two years after World War II ended, is a year worth review. Åsbrink’s book, translated from the Swedish, makes some of that year’s neglected history and high drama tangible and meaningful.
With a technique reminiscent of John Dos Passos’ “newsreels,” the author records events from across the world (Paris, Palestine, New York, Los Angeles, Budapest, Berlin, Delhi, etc.), using the present tense to create a sense of immediacy. During this year, Primo Levi is 28 and living in Turin, and 56-year-old Nelly Sachs is in Stockholm. Christian Dior arouses global grievance with his “New Look,” and Arnold Schoenberg creates a new musical form. Unreformed Nazis make their unimpeded way to South America, where they freely publish and deny the Holocaust. The Jewish Irgun fights the British in Palestine. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Arab League vehemently reject the U.N. partition plan. More than 4,500 displaced men, women, and children aboard the Exodus are turned away from the Holy Land. The Muslim Brotherhood began to flourish as the Marshall Plan took shape. Chuck Yeager flies faster than sound, and Britain, as it departs the subcontinent, carves Pakistan from India. It is a time when the British Empire diminishes and the Cold War flourishes. In an account that serves as the core of her book, the author’s father makes his way from deprivation and danger to safety. Throughout the book, Åsbrink artfully selects her narratives. Though romantic Anglophiles will not find a report of the marriage of Philip and Elizabeth, the love story of Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren is more intriguing (“they set their own rules for their transatlantic love, beyond convention and the law”).
A skillful and illuminating way of presenting, to wonderful effect, the cultural, political, and personal history of a year that changed the world.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-896-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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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