“I have written about crime because it illustrates more clearly than anything else the contrasts that form the basis of...
Diagnosed with the cancer that would take his life in 2015, the creator of the Kurt Wallander mysteries (An Event in Autumn, 2014, etc.) casts an impassioned eye on life and death.
Readers looking for either a narrative autobiography or a memoir of the Swedish novelist’s last illness will need to adjust their expectations. What Mankell offers instead is a commonplace book in which memories of things he’s seen or felt over the past 60 years inspire fiercely philosophical ruminations. Mankell retrospectively decides to date the onset of his fatal illness, which he likens to a pit of quicksand, to a car crash he walked away from a week before he first noticed the pain in his neck that sent him to the doctor. He likens cancer therapists to the fraudulent psychic Uri Geller. He recalls examples of appalling cruelty he saw in Budapest and Maputo. He speculates about the biological foundations for the different reasons men and women get jealous, and he confesses how troubled he is “that I shall be dead for so long.” Although Mankell’s reflections are deeply personal, readers will learn little about the details of his life because he remains resolutely extroverted, a keen observer of the world whose illness encourages him to take the long view. He describes the future ice ages climate scientists have predicted for 10,000 years, 20,000 years, and 60,000 years from now and repeatedly returns to the dim prospects for the Earth and its people, who have come to depend on the integrity of systems to dispose of nuclear waste that is expected to remain dangerously radioactive for 1,000 centuries.
“I have written about crime because it illustrates more clearly than anything else the contrasts that form the basis of human life,” writes Mankell. After digesting these piercing intimations of mortality, readers will suspect that some subjects illustrate those contrasts even more clearly.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-43215-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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