Readers not alienated by this stance will appreciate the sympathetic portrait of Ruth Paine; against the reactionary Texas...
Offbeat study of Ruth Paine, an ordinary woman who wished to reach out to a Russian immigrant and learn her language—and wound up sheltering Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Novelist and essayist Mallon (In Fact, 2001, etc.) appears fascinated by the convergence of great forces and small that Paine represents. Paine, a Quaker, once wrote of herself at Antioch College that “I seek to fill the needs of those whom I meet”—a sentiment that summarizes her marriage, failing in 1963, as well as her relationship with the Oswalds, whom she met at a party that February, following her involvement in language-exchange programs. Initially pursuing a friendship with the forlorn (and abused) Marina, by April, Paine had offered to let her and her child live with her in exchange for lessons in conversational Russian. Although Oswald himself roomed elsewhere, Paine aided him also, directing him toward temporary employment—at the Book Depository—and storing his possessions (including, unwittingly, his mail-order carbine) in her garage. These actions have long since damned both Paines among conspiracy theorists, who have charged them with being Communist moles, and worse. Mallon strikes a strong case to the contrary, detailing their full cooperation with the Warren Commission, and Ruth’s strangely persistent attempts to help Marina, post-assassination, which were rebuffed; indeed, Oswald’s survivors attacked Ruth in their attempts to mitigate his evident guilt. Mallon unearths a few genuine revelations, principally that Ruth’s estranged, self-involved husband Michael viewed the infamous photo of gun-toting Oswald months before the assassination, yet revealed nothing of it to the violence-phobic Ruth. The author’s interviews with Ruth paint an affecting portrait of her deceptively simple spirituality, ruptured by history. Regarding JFK conspiracy theorists, Mallon scorns their interpretations as lurid and biased, without addressing the doubts still held by many.
Readers not alienated by this stance will appreciate the sympathetic portrait of Ruth Paine; against the reactionary Texas backdrop, she embodies much of the thwarted idealism still associated with JFK.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42117-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
