That a man can spend seven years chained to a wall and less than two years later write such a lucid and compassionate memoir...
Tremendously moving account by the AP's former Chief Middle East Correspondent of his 2,454 days as a hostage of the Islamic terrorist organization Hezbollah.
Anderson's memoir comes fast after fellow hostage Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradlingand complements it superbly. (A third hostage memoir, Terry Waite's Taken on Trust, is due out from Harcourt Brace in October but with no advance galleys.) Anderson shares neither Keenan's word-mastery nor his relentless focus on what goes on inside the hostage's cell, heart, and mind (Anderson's major attempts here at introspection, free-form poems that dot his text, are best overlooked). But the ex-reporter's plain and simple narration still packs a wallop and offers much deeper background on political maneuvers surrounding the hostage drama (including Oliver North and Ronald Reagan's respective roles)—with this background complemented by italicized reminiscences from Anderson's then-fiancee, Madeline Bassil. Anderson is also more frank than Keenan about the fluctuating condition of his fellow hostages (who for a time included Keenan himself), especially about squabbles (with up to five men chained into a tiny room, feuds sometimes lasted for weeks), as well as the madness that afflicted American hostage Frank Reed. Otherwise, the memoir at hand much parallels Keenan's: a litany of abuse, suffering, and despair; a paean to love, hope, and courage—which, in Anderson's case, finds its wrenching apexes on the day when Terry Waite, after four years in solitary, is led into Anderson's group of hostages; and on the day when Anderson, blindfolded, feels "Someone [put] a hand on my shoulder'' and is told, 'I'm a Syrian colonel. You're free.'"
That a man can spend seven years chained to a wall and less than two years later write such a lucid and compassionate memoir of his ordeal is a remarkable testament to humanity—as well as an unimpeachable indictment of the terrorism that chained his body but not his spirit.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-59301-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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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