A clear, unpretentious volume that justly celebrates a couple who risked all for others.
Companion volume to the upcoming Ken Burns’ PBS documentary about an American couple who rescued people threatened by the Nazi whirlwind in Europe.
Readers familiar with Burns’ documentaries will recognize some of his techniques transferred here into text by writer Joukowsky (co-director of the film), who first approached Burns about this story featuring his grandparents, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, a story Joukowsky had thoroughly researched and already begun to film. There are passages quoted from correspondence between the two, touching intimate moments, mentions of myriads of documents, photographs, and interviews (which readers must wait for PBS to see), and follow-ups on the principals and some supporting players. Waitstill was a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts when, in 1939, the American Unitarian Association recruited the couple to go to Prague to aid those under imminent Nazi threat. The Sharps succeeded in astonishing fashion, helping people slip out of the country, feeding the hungry, avoiding ubiquitous Nazi surveillance, and rescuing children from utter poverty. There were many near misses, and many moments of frustration, fear, and labyrinthine bureaucracy á la Dickens’ Bleak House. There are also some surprises. They helped the son of Thomas Mann escape; Harvard’s Jerome Bruner supported Martha during her subsequent run for Congress. The author generally adopts a neutral narrative tone, though he does blast Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long (“anti-Semitic, xenophobic”), and a couple of times he notes the irony of the Sharps spending so much time away from their own children to go abroad to help others’ children. But the author’s portraits are generally flattering, even when he chronicles the couple’s divorce. True tension, though, is hard to create when we know from the outset that both survived the war.
A clear, unpretentious volume that justly celebrates a couple who risked all for others.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7182-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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