An emotionally stirring profile of an extraordinary woman.
A debut dramatized biography chronicles a Norwegian immigrant’s experiences in America and her remarkable love story.
Especially after her mother died in 1899, Anna Ingevich longed to depart her native Norway for the promise of a new life in the United States. She suffered an acrimonious relationship with her stepmother, and secreted away her earnings to travel by steamship to America, absconding without telling any of her family. While aboard the ship, she met Rasmus Johnson, also en route to America from Norway—he was engaged, but his fiancee, Astrid, couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Scandinavia and so he traveled alone. Rasmus and Anna quickly became infatuated with each other, and by the middle of a monthlong journey, had mutually professed their love. They planned to take up temporary residence at a boardinghouse in New York City and marry immediately. But Rasmus received an apologetic telegram from Astrid’s family, saying that she was on her way to meet him in New York. Even though Rasmus loved Anna more, he believed he owed it to Astrid as a matter of honor to stay true to her. Anna decided that she and Rasmus should part immediately. Hoff, the husband of Anna’s grandchild, ably tracks her travel from New York to South Dakota, as she learned to shoot guns and ride horses along the way. She eventually married and had a child with another Norwegian, Iver Olson. But tortured by a promise to one day build Anna a house, Rasmus found her and, with Astrid’s blessing, consummated that pledge. The author writes plainly and clearly, permitting the undeniable power of the tale itself to take center stage. The account is related in novelistic form. Because his research could not supply all the facts of Anna’s story, Hoff necessarily fills in some of the blanks, but he accomplishes this with a light, unobtrusive touch. Some readers may find Rasmus’ obsession with fulfilling his promise more bizarre than admirable, and Anna’s acquiescence equally peculiar. Still, this is a captivating tale, overflowing with adventure and romance.
An emotionally stirring profile of an extraordinary woman.Pub Date: March 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-4197-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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