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BROTHERS EMANUEL

A MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY

Well-written and heartfelt but short on dramatic moments and memorable anecdotes.

The brother of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel relates the history of his family’s classic immigrants-make-good American story.

Ezekiel Emanuel’s memoir is ostensibly the story of how he and his brothers, Rahm and Ari, developed their unique personalities and talents over the years. The author became a respected research scientist specializing in bioethics, his brother Ari, a successful talent agent, and his brother Rahm worked for the Clinton campaign in 1992 and eventually became Barack Obama’s chief of staff. Yet despite the brothers' ambitions in their respective fields, they aren't the ones whose lives make for the most interesting focal point in the book: It’s the parents who actually lived the memoir-worthy lives. The father, Ben, was a direct participant in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, interrupting his medical studies to act as an amateur secret agent and then joining the Israeli artillery in the fight against the Egyptians. After the war, he finished medical school in Switzerland before coming to America to set up his practice. Their mother was a staunch left-wing activist in the 1960s; she brought her sons to some of the most heated political protests in Chicago. Comparatively, the early life that Ezekiel and his brothers led in the Chicago suburbs was fairly comfortable and middle-class, with all three brothers going to expensive, exclusive colleges on their father’s dime and studiously sticking to the straight-and-narrow path to professional success. In fact, the most exciting thing that happened to the author came while studying in England: He was jailed in Oxford for supposedly resisting arrest while breaking bike safety laws.

Well-written and heartfelt but short on dramatic moments and memorable anecdotes.

Pub Date: March 26, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4000-6903-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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