Stereotyped by admirers and critics alike, Pope John Paul II finds in former Wall Street Journal reporter Kwitny (Acceptable Risks, 1992, etc.) a biographer who takes his full measure. Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was already a formidable intellect, mystic, and Polish patriot when he made the surprising ascent from his archdiocese of Krakow to Rome in 1978. Kwitny reveals, for what seems to be the first time, how Wojtyla's Catholic School Ethics (1953) anticipated methods of nonviolent protest used by Martin Luther King Jr. a few years later; how he nurtured many of the intellectuals who later formed Solidarity; and how he secretly ordained priests who would serve elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain. Just as important, Wojtyla pressed the regime to adhere to promises of noninterference with the Church and protection of human rights. As pope he has also denounced dictators and Mafia chieftains in their own territories; owned up to past Church mistakes in alienating scientists, other Christian churches, and Jews; and called for a democratic welfare state that would avoid the worst extremes of both communism and capitalism. Yet Kwitny notes that these actions have been overlooked because of the Western media's fixation on his opposition to birth control and abortion, the pope's sensitive position as head of a worldwide organization, and self-serving claims by Reagan administration officials to have undermined communism. In particular, Kwitny argues that the ``Holy Alliance'' between Reagan and the pope to save Solidarity— postulated in Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi's recent His Holiness (not reviewed) and Peter Schweizer's Victory (1994)—steals credit from John Paul and the Poles themselves. While not by any means uncritical of the pontiff (scoring his crackdown on Church dissenters and the lack of concern for finances and clerical anguish over celibacy that allowed scandals to erupt), Kwitny offers a strong, convincing argument for him as one of the century's great proponents of nonviolence and freedom. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-2688-6
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
