A timely, artfully written memoir of one man's war.
Art historian and critic Lord (Mythic Giacometti, 2004, etc.) recounts his life as a gay GI in World War II.
The author presents himself as utterly ordinary, “average of height, weight, build, unremarkable, in short, in every outward aspect.” That unremarkable nature proved useful, for Lord was living a dangerous life in those days—and, as he notes, even today, “parents in Dallas, Dijon, or Dar es Salaam hardly hope that their kids will grow up to live in sin with same-sex partners.” Understanding his own inclinations early on, Lord shipped out to the European theater in various combat-support roles. An intelligent writer capable of holding a conversation in French, he found himself interviewing and processing displaced persons. Moreover, no thanks to the interventions of a sympathetic colonel with a penchant for calling him “baby,” he also earned a reputation for having “a unique faculty for antagonizing your superiors,” as one officer growls. Lord recounts scrapes with GIs who were progressive in all ways but the amatory. Of more interest to cultural historians, he relates travels through wartime France that afforded him meetings with Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, the latter two confessing a fondness for Ulysses S. Grant. (“We quite prefer him to Lincoln,” Miss Toklas pronounced.) The author writes with occasional archness, much irony and good humor, but this is no Catch-22. By his account, which takes many dark turns, it is clear that he and other gay soldiers on the battlefield did as much as anyone to win the war.
A timely, artfully written memoir of one man's war.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-21748-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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