by Mario Vargas Llosa ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1994
In this artful political and literary memoir, the 57-year-old Peruvian author (In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990, etc.) and presidential candidate demonstrates the conflict between ideals and politics, art and power. Switching between his personal and his political lives, Vargas Llosa depicts his stormy childhood divided between his mother's loving family and his abusive father, who sent the boy first to a Catholic school, where a priest's sexual abuse turned him against sex and religion, and then to a military school, where he won respect for the love letters and erotica he provided his classmates. By 16, he was a working journalist for the sensationalist press, and, after entering the state-run university — notorious in the '50s for its lapsed academic standards, student unrest, and impoverished socialist thinking — became a research assistant for a historian of Peru. At 19, he married his 32-year-old aunt (described in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982), a choice he came to regret on his first trip to Paris, which he won in a writing contest. The alternate political chapters start with his decision in 1987, aged 50 and an accomplished writer returning from a long residence in Europe, to address a demonstration of a new political party, the Freedom Movement. He later became the party's presidential candidate, and describes his platform as a visionary program of social, educational, and economic reform capable of empowering the lower classes and rescuing Peru from the authoritarian and militaristic government that destroyed its spirit and its culture. He campaigned under the threat of terrorism, kidnapping, and violence that, he writes, chacterize Peruvian politics. Vargas Llosa's narrative skill and novelist's eye animate the unfamiliar politics, people, and culture of Peru. Essential political as well as literary reading.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-15509-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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