Beautifully written memories of a youth filled with literature, language, family, friendship, love, lust and a place that is...
Judaism, community, friendship, love, Farhoud, and above all, reading and writing, form the core of Kattan’s vibrant telling of his upbringing in Jewish Baghdad during the mid-20th century.
The book is infused with vivid descriptions of the people and places the author, born in 1928, encountered from his school-age years through young adulthood and up until his departure for France in 1947. Some of his most reverential, emotional and poignant language is reserved for the recounting of his exposure to world literature and foreign languages and his relationship with Baghdad’s active literary community, which began to seriously develop when Kattan was only 13. At the same time, he movingly evokes the terror and transformative effects of the destructive and deadly May 1941 attacks against the Jews of Baghdad, which were at least in part fueled by the snowballing Nazi destruction of European Jewry. Until this Farhoud, Iraqi Jews had long lived in relative harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, a peace that has not been restored since. As a teenager already emerging as a successful writer, Kattan navigated cultural divides. But while he was accepted by both Arabic and Jewish presses, he remained painfully aware of the possible repercussions of speaking in a Jewish dialect in Baghdad. The book functions as a loving homage to a time and community that has since virtually disappeared. It is written in tones that convey the wonderment, yearnings and joys of a boy who, in becoming a young man, discovers the meaning of deepening friendships, the first stirrings and fumbling pursuits of love and desire and the beauty of learning to read fluently in Arabic and French.
Beautifully written memories of a youth filled with literature, language, family, friendship, love, lust and a place that is no more.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55192-799-3
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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