Cultural history and memoir gracefully entwined.
A journalist debuts with a memoir of the struggles of his Armenian family to survive the political and military complexities and cruelties of the past century.
The history of Armenia is tangled, and the author wisely focuses on three principal biographical threads. The signal event is the massive 1988 earthquake that shook the region, killing tens of thousands of Armenians and rendering homeless hundreds of thousands more. The author then segues to the 1915 genocide perpetrated by the Turks on the Armenians—1.5 million killed. One fortunate survivor was the author’s great-grandfather Kaspar, a teen at the time, whose story drives the first part of the narrative. After losing his entire family, Kaspar wandered through a wasteland—suffering, experiencing both startling kindness and cruelty—eventually making his way to the United States in 1920, where he found relatives in the San Joaquin Valley in California. He worked hard and accumulated power, prestige and wealth among other Armenian immigrants. One of his sons, Richard (the author’s grandfather), was a bookish lad who eventually became a UCLA professor, the world’s most respected scholar on Armenian history—the multivolume The Republic of Armenia is his masterwork. Richard’s son Raffi (the author’s father), who also earned academic honors and graduate degrees, settled into a high-paying legal career, then surrendered all and took his family abroad, where he labored for years among his people to try to bring them hope and political stability. In and out of political favor, Raffi enjoyed periods of great popularity, political exile and deep poverty. Raffi’s first son was Garin (the author), whose story weaves in and out of Raffi’s in the final pages. Hovannisian narratives in a swift, novel-like style, slowed only occasionally by the mass of detail and by the geographical and political complexity.
Cultural history and memoir gracefully entwined.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-179208-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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