Breezy, informative, and wholly enjoyable.
Journalist Rubenstein debuts with a wild tale of true-life folk hero Attila Ambrus, who lost his innocence in post-communist Hungary as he and the nation grappled with the demands of capitalism.
The evolution of Attila Ambrus from janitor to the beloved “Whiskey Robber” (so called due to his penchant for getting stinking drunk before carrying out his capers) was slow, but in hindsight practically inevitable. Raised in Romania, where discrimination against ethnic Hungarians like himself was widespread, Ambrus at age 21 risked his life to cross the border into Hungary, clinging to the underside of a train car, only to be treated as a hopeless country bumpkin by his new fellow citizens. The Hungarians were mostly occupied, however, in figuring out how to negotiate the new economy as their country raced toward Western-style capitalism while corrupt officials and business people found new ways to embezzle millions at the expense of the common man. In this unwelcoming climate, Ambrus somehow had to land a job. A disastrous but gutsy tryout led to his employment as a janitor for the hockey team UTE (Ujpest Gym Assocation), but it didn't pay quite enough to make ends meet. Legitimate opportunities were scarce, so when the chance arose to smuggle some pelts from Transylvania, Ambrus made it work. From there it was no great leap to robbing a post office, and once that was done, it was easy to do it again. By the time he was finally apprehended, the nonviolent, unfailingly polite bandit had captured the Hungarian public’s heart as a gentleman crook in a country where corrupt captains of industry who had stolen far more than he went unpunished. The author makes abundantly clear his delight in Ambrus’s odd history, energy, and circle of friends; never was there a more entertaining case history of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.
Breezy, informative, and wholly enjoyable.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-07167-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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