Delves deeply into memory, history and imagination.
A well-wrought memoir about growing up in Bulgaria during the dreary Communist years.
Nestled between Romania, Turkey and Macedonia on the Black Sea, Bulgaria is a country that Westerners know little about, likely due to its long closure from the Western world and the Slavic language barrier. Kassabova (The Best of Delhi, 2008, etc.), who spent expat years in New Zealand and Scotland, opens this history-rich country to readers. The author was raised in Sofia with her parents, both intellectuals, and younger sister in a “two-room flat in an eight-floor concrete building surrounded by thousands of identical concrete buildings, purposeful and sturdy like nuclear plants in freshly bulldozed fields of mud.” Their building was called “Youth 3” (after Youth 1 and 2), and as a child Kassabova suspected that something was wrong with their meager, joyless world: “ ‘Mum, why is everything so ugly?’ To which my mother couldn’t find an honest answer, except to hide her tears.” At one point, the author suffered from a mysterious auto-immune disease probably resulting from the Chernobyl fallout. Some of her father’s colleagues from Holland, arriving in an extravagant van wearing bright, pastel clothing and eating unimaginable treats, reinforced the family’s shame and the sense that they were not equal. Education offered only “an inhabitable space in the uninhabitable Youths” and “the possibility to emigrate ‘internally.’ ” After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, when the author was 16, she and her parents were finally allowed to emigrate. Kassabova’s work encompasses both her early years and her return trips to Sofia and other areas of Bulgaria, during which she visited relatives, trekked the Balkan mountains and explored Balkan history and ancient myths (Orpheus was born in the Rhodope mountains). As both an insider and outsider, the author is able to assess her complex country with a simultaneously fond and critical gaze.
Delves deeply into memory, history and imagination.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60239-645-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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