A fascinating story with a tight focus, though the writing is closer to a comic book than a journalistic piece.
A concise graphic narrative of secret negotiations that helped keep the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa from becoming even more of a bloodbath.
The heroism of Nelson Mandela has earned him international renown and respect. Veteran British journalist Carlin (Chase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius, 2014, etc.), who served as South African correspondent through the era depicted here, tells the story from the perspective of the other protagonist, Constand Viljoen, the general who had formerly been Mandela’s chief antagonist. Viljoen was the military chief of apartheid South Africa; in his retirement, he continued to view Mandela as a communist and the enemy of white South Africa. Yet times were changing, and the general’s brother was changing with them, advancing the argument that patriotism required serving the best interests of all South Africans, black and white. Amid the democratic reforms and Mandela’s release from prison, it was clear that the black citizens had the numbers on their side while the armed white forces retained the firepower. Viljoen had entered his retirement feeling “powerless to stop my country descending into darkness and despair.” As the struggle between black and white intensified, white nationalists implored the general to unite their factional divisions: “You are a legend in the South African military; you are the only leader capable of uniting us into one force capable of stopping Mandela.” The general believed in this mission, but his brother served as an intermediary from Mandela to arrange a meeting, where the two felt mutual respect and forged a common goal, a peaceful resolution with a government that would provide representation for both black and white. When they went public with their views, both were denounced by radicals who wanted total victory for their side, but that cost in human life would have been devastating. The general served his president and called him “the greatest of men.” Though dialogue drives the narrative, the most striking art has the fewest words, as illustrator Malet provides some historical context for the negotiations.
A fascinating story with a tight focus, though the writing is closer to a comic book than a journalistic piece.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87486-820-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Plough
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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