A firsthand account of a time when so much seemed up for grabs.
Mokhtefi (Paris: An Illustrated History, 2002) offers a memoir of international radical activism, from helping Algeria and Africa shake the yoke of colonialism to helping the Black Panthers establish a revolutionary outpost in exile.
The narrative sometimes reads like a memoir of high society, though the glamorous names include Eldridge Cleaver (with whom the author had a close and complicated relationship), Timothy Leary, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Luc Godard, and Simone de Beauvoir. It was an era derided by Tom Wolfe as “radical chic,” when revolutionary militancy became a fashion statement and a New York girl who presented herself as innocent as well as idealistic could find herself in the center of it all. “Life was exciting and eventful,” writes Mokhtefi. “I was the fly on the window, looking in, beating its wings.” As a translator and facilitator whose adventures took her from New York to Paris to Algeria to elsewhere in Africa, the author found herself getting relationship tips from Fanon, who had asked her what she wanted; she replied, “to put my head on someone’s shoulder.” Not revolutionary enough, he responded and counseled her to “stay upright on your own two feet and keep moving forward to goals of your own.” Thus she did, though one senses that the sexual tension with Cleaver might have amounted to something if he hadn’t declared her off-limits for everyone, including himself (making her apparently the only female to whom he was attracted that he considered off-limits). Mokhtefi has mixed feelings about the man whose life he credited her with saving and whom she considered a great revolutionary leader early on. He beat his wife, he murdered a man for having a sexual relationship with his wife, and he “had a reputation for throwing fat on the fire,” taking dangerous situations and making them more dangerous. Still, “despite the things about him I despised—his killer instinct, his womanizing—I admired the man.”
A firsthand account of a time when so much seemed up for grabs.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78873-000-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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