In this winner of the European Book Prize, Leo not only produces a moving family memoir, but also a probing exploration of...
A prize-winning German journalist’s account of how he revisited his family’s socialist past to find answers about his parents' relationship to him and to each other.
The self-proclaimed “bourgeois” of his family, Berliner Zeitung editor Maxim grew up in East Berlin. His parents, Anne and Wolf, were rebels who often made him wish “they could be as normal as all the other parents I knew.” Part of what made them different was that Anne was from West Germany and Wolf, from the East. Gerhard, Anne’s father, fought with the French Resistance and then returned home after the war to build the East German state. By contrast, Werner, Wolf’s father, was a French prisoner of war who returned home a broken man who found his balm in East German socialism. Following the idealism of her father, Anne developed a desire to “put her life at the service of the [Socialist] Party” and became a journalist like Gerhard. Eventually, she abandoned her career when she could not tolerate the censorship she witnessed or the outright lies she saw published, and she retreated into university life. Yet, however disenchanted she was with the East German state, “she remain[ed] a Socialist deep down.” Wolf had a more openly critical attitude toward prevailing political ideology. An artist, he expressed his opinions through his work, nervously aware of the tightrope he walked between ideological conformity and resistance. When change finally came to East Germany in 1989, Anne was able to distance herself from the “unhappy [socialist] love of her youth” thanks to her academic training. But Wolf “missed the security he had previously found so constricting,” and the “long love and long argument” that had been his marriage to Anne finally came to end.
In this winner of the European Book Prize, Leo not only produces a moving family memoir, but also a probing exploration of the human need to believe and belong.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-908968-51-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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