By turns delightful and frustrating.
Uneven follow-up to the Oprah-blessed hit Stolen Lives (2001).
That volume chronicled the 20 years the author and her family spent as political prisoners in Morocco. Here, Oufkir charts the strange process of returning to the world of the free. The strongest sections offer trenchant observations about ordinary life. Sickened by the ease with which people waste food, the author finds herself barely able to eat in restaurants; every time she sees a patron pick at complimentary bread and play with pats of butter, she remembers the rotten eggs that were her regular prison fare. She can’t quite get her head around credit cards or ATM machines, either. “We no longer call things by their names,” she declares, disdaining the replacement of plain words like “the elderly” with euphemisms like “seniors.” The book’s overall structure, thematic rather than chronological, works well, and translator Coverdale has crafted a conversational but never chatty tone. Oufkir’s description of her gradual recovery of healthy sexuality is honest and fascinating. Elsewhere, she falters. A chapter on fundamentalism has potential, but the author ultimately doesn’t have any real insight into how “religion set itself up handsomely” during her two decades in jail; the section peters out with an unsatisfying story about some Moroccan men who flirt with radical Islam, only to return to secularism. Oufkir can also be annoyingly coy and cagey; she devotes nine pages to the reparations she was paid by the Moroccan government but never tells the reader how much money she received. If she wanted to keep the details private, she should have cut the chapter; talking around the figure is simply distracting. And nattering on about publishing Stolen Lives and meeting Oprah Winfrey is a bit obnoxious.
By turns delightful and frustrating.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-5206-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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