A rich, haunting and deceptively simple work.
Short, sharp stunner of a memoir of a youth spent in a series of Russian children's homes.
Gallego, born with cerebral palsy, unable to stand on his own two feet, was abandoned by his parents and institutionalized by his grandfather, the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party in the 1960s. The reader is shuttled from scene to scene of Gallego's childhood, much as the author was moved from place to place; it's a kaleidoscope of memories of kindness and hardship, companionship and towering loneliness. Gallego begins by explaining how he would get to the bathroom at night as a child (by throwing himself to the floor and crawling naked along the freezing hallway), but it rapidly becomes clear that this is no tear-jerker, and that Gallego doesn't want pity. While he does discuss the poor treatment he received at the hands of attendants, who complained endlessly about carrying him, so much so that at one point he resolved to stop eating, most of his fury is directed at the wider world and its blatant injustices. And always, there is the haunting fear of what would become of him when he reached adulthood; the usual practice was to deposit disabled teenagers in old-folks' homes and leave them to lie in their own filth until they died.
A rich, haunting and deceptively simple work.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101227-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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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