Kahn—pugnacious world-class shipping magnate and survivor of the Nazi holocaust—presents a fascinating personal history displaying equal parts of bravado and bravery. As a young man Kahn was a neighbor of Anne Frank's and just a few years older than the celebrated child diarist. In his opinion (and he is expansive in his opinions), Anne might have lived if only the Franks had taken their fate in their own hands—as he did. After a particularly aggressive opening, in which he sketches in his present happy circumstances, Kahn describes his painful childhood. His distant mother abandoned the family when he was four; his father seemed to him an ineffectual blowhard and never earned his respect. A sad, difficult childhood, it seems, prepared Kahn for the necessity of living by his wits. The wily teenager, frequently with the aid of friends and strangers, Jewish and Christian, repeatedly eluded the Nazis, determined to get to England to carry on the fight, and convinced that ``doing everything in one's power to save one's own neck'' was ``the only reasonable'' strategy open to an adolescent alone and at terrible risk in enemy territory. The tale of his long flight across Europe is one of lofty adventure, punctuated by hairbreadth escapes and occasional sex. Kahn finished the war as a Dutch naval officer. Then his career took him to sea in the service of Israel, where, his faith in the Almighty damaged by the Holocaust, he found lasting belief in the Jewish people. His story ends aboard his yacht, with a faithful factotum preparing drinks in the background while the entrepreneur muses about his life. In a rapid-fire, tough-guy mode, Kahn (with evident writerly help from his collaborator, Israeli journalist and translator Halkin) speaks with the authority of a special kind of Dutch uncle. If there is more than a hint of hubris, it may not be entirely unearned. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 965-229-174-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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