Visceral memoir of a rough, criminal upbringing in a curious outpost of exiled Siberians near the Moldovan border.
Transnistria was inhabited by a group of transplanted Siberian Urkas, deported during the Stalinist era of Communist collectivization and now deeply entrenched in a nether region. “The people of our villainous district were like one big family,” writes Lilin, who grew up in a house full of wondrous weapons, icons and crucifixes. His father and other males of the family were professional criminals who made good livings as robbers and thugs and boasted a string of prison sentences and violent run-ins with the police. From an early age, the author had to learn the criminal code of conduct, involving elaborate gun-handling rules, resistance to government at all costs, prison stories and the forming of special relationships with older community members, who taught him the old ways. By reciting a Pushkin poem, the author earned a cherished pike, or flick knife, the traditional weapon of the Siberian criminal, and became a hero among his friends. Lilin was also a talented artist and apprenticed at age 12 to learn the trade of the kolshik, or tattoo artist. He and his band of boys were dubbed “Siberian Education,” and were soon embroiled in gang fights, running messages for their fathers and skirmishes with police. In between stints in juvenile prison, the author relates touching moments, such as the prison etiquette still observed when the old criminals dined at Aunt Katya’s restaurant. Lilin’s youthful scrapes and wild yarns eventually ran up against Russian military service at age 18, and the hothead was shipped out to fight saboteurs in Chechnya. A stark account that projects raw energy and youthful swagger.
Pub Date: April 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-08085-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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