Is there a father alive who would not weep at such an artful, tender tribute?
A Colombian writer delivers a rousing, affecting tribute to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a professor and physician who was murdered in 1987 by radical political opponents.
Gómez—who, according to the author, had limited skill with his hands and once inadvertently hastened the death of a surgical patient—moved from private practice to become a passionate advocate for public health, in Colombia and elsewhere, and a fiery writer of books, essays and op-ed pieces opposing violence and promoting personal freedom and equality—ideas sure to get you killed in many places. The son adored the father and writes about what in many ways was an ideal, if not idyllic, childhood. Gómez was extraordinarily affectionate and latitudinarian in just about everything. He continually encouraged his son, profoundly patient with him and loved him with a patent preference that in some ways, as the author recognizes, was unfair to the author’s sisters. Abad remembers the conflicts in his family, notably the deeply pious Roman Catholic women who struggled mightily against the father’s more liberal religious views. He also remembers with lingering horror the death of his own talented sister to cancer. The author creates enormous dramatic irony in his text: We know from the beginning that his father will be murdered, so Abad imbues every moment with an aching pathos. The translators have preserved his facile and sophisticated uses of the language. One 205-word sentence, for example, unspools with absolute clarity. Sometimes the detail is grim and wrenching—a sewer pipe clogged with tapeworms, his poor dying sister’s physical decline, his father’s bullet-riddled corpse. One small reservation: a tendency—somewhat understandable—to quote excessively from his father’s publications.
Is there a father alive who would not weep at such an artful, tender tribute?Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-22397-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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