Thankfully for readers, Guibert promises a prequel volume on Cope’s childhood in California, in testament to “the...
This epic graphic memoir spans oceans and generations, with a narrative as engrossing as the artistry that illustrates it.
In his preface, renowned French graphic novelist Guibert (co-author: The Professor’s Daughter, 2007, etc.) explains the bond he shared with the much older Cope, who had served as an American soldier during World War II and left his native country to return to France in the aftermath. “He spoke well; I listened well,” writes Guibert. “Save two or three, his anecdotes were nothing spectacular. They evoked only very remotely what movies or books about the Second World War had taught me. Still, I found them captivating, because of the accents of truth they contained. I could literally see what he was describing.” Now the American reader can as well (the first volume of the collaboration was initially published in France in 2000, the year after Cope’s death). As the title suggests, this is one man’s war memories, filled not with tales of larger-than-life heroism but with the chance encounters, tragic absurdities and small kindnesses experienced by a sheltered young soldier of uncommon intelligence, as recollected by an older man who has come to take stock of his life and reconsider the values by which he has lived it. He comes to question himself, his country and humanity in general, while retaining a humanitarian warmth and a deep appreciation for the arts. The narrative voice is captivating, and the black-and-white illustrations are often stunning, whether capturing the grandeur of Big Sur and the giant redwoods of California or showing the destruction of European villages by soldiers who shared a common bond of humanity with the civilian “enemy.” The Veteran’s Day publication befits a volume that underscores the resonance and legacy of war.
Thankfully for readers, Guibert promises a prequel volume on Cope’s childhood in California, in testament to “the storyteller in him that I was drawn to—his personality, his style, his voice, and his astounding memory.”Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59643-096-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: First Second/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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