The author continues and deepens the testimony first presented in her 1980s autobiography, I, Rigoberta Mench£ (not reviewed). Mench£ begins here with her being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and her subsequent return to her native Guatemala in 1994. In exile for most of the 20 years previous, she had spent her time campaigning ceaselessly against the murderous counterinsurgency campaigns in Guatemala that claimed the lives of thousands, including her parents and several siblings. She became a strong advocate for human rights, especially for the rights of the indigenous people of her own land and throughout the world. The Nobel Peace Prize has, in fact, brought her little peace. Upon his return to Guatemala, her nephew, mistaken for her son, is immediately kidnaped (and, thankfully, returned). Weeks before the country’s first reasonably open elections in a generation, the army carries out yet another massacre, in the village of Xaman. Amid this setting of hope and despair, Mench£ meditates on several themes. She speaks lyrically (the translation seems wonderful) of the sweet mysteries of her Mayan childhood, of the “cosmovision” of her people, of the wisdom, boldness, and courage of her mother. These make up her identity, her nawaal, the shadow that accompanies her and sustains her. She tells of the frustrations of her work at the United Nations, where the simple recognition of the existence of indigenous people was a major struggle. She reveals dreams, spiritual and political, that are yet to be. She dreams of a world accepting of difference, of “pluri-cultural” societies, of a time when her “Indian” face will not mark her as the other, of a time of justice. She dreams of her hair growing white, a symbol of wisdom that her mother, whose life was cut short, was denied. Mench£ emerges here as precisely what she is, a hero. (maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-85984-893-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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