Still, a valuable and absorbing chronicle of a terrible ordeal and of the transcendent courage shown by both its survivors...
A notable European intellectual’s path from persecution, exile and privation to the status of spokesman for his embattled country’s resiliency.
Born in 1933, Konrád grew up among a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family supported by his father’s hardware store, until the Nazis’ approach persuaded the Hungarian government to capitulate. “The town had deported its Jewish citizens,” Konrád recalls more than 60 years later, “and viewed all their possessions as its own, moving strangers into their houses.” The episodic story of young George’s survival (with his sister and two male cousins) after the “removal” of their parents from their village (Berettyóújfalu) is an odyssey of hasty travel, crowded and imperiled experiences at home and abroad shared with those who sheltered them, and—following “Liberation” in 1945—return to Hungary (in a cattle car) to a nearly destroyed home and a future whose bleakness was mitigated by their parents’ safe return from an Austrian internment camp. The book’s latter half depicts Konrád’s salvation through formal education; jobs as social worker, magazine editor and teacher; the publication of his brilliant first novel (The Case Worker, 1969) and the polarizing sociopolitical study (The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, 1979) he co-authored; and the hard-won acquisition of survival skills required of Hungary’s Jews, doubly victimized by the Third Reich and by the violent class struggle of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Konrád’s novelistic skills (also displayed in such fiction as The City Builder, 1977, and Stonedial, 2000) produce vivid, terse sketches of numerous relatives and acquaintances, and the book features dozens of heart-stopping perceptions (e.g., the realization that his aged mother’s “forgetfulness may help her. . . . She is letting go of her burdens”). But the book is flawed by confusing past-present shifts, and an imbalance that is presumably the result of its “slightly edited” second half.
Still, a valuable and absorbing chronicle of a terrible ordeal and of the transcendent courage shown by both its survivors and its victims.Pub Date: April 24, 2007
ISBN: 1-59051-139-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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