A feebly written profile in courage. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
A Jewish nurse recalls her myriad adventures in WWII as a spy operating under the noses of the Nazis.
Cohn, who grew up in French Lorraine but spoke German fluently, begins in 1945. Posing as a German nurse, she is about to slip into enemy territory as an intelligence agent. She ends the first chapter with Nazis pointing weapons at her, then invites us to wait as she fills in the intervening autobiographical detail. Born in 1920, Cohn experienced the Holocaust firsthand. Like many others, she and her family found themselves gradually isolated, then singled out for arrest and deportation. (A sister died at Auschwitz; her lover was executed for his resistance activities.) A determined young woman whose features the Nazis did not consider “Jewish,” Cohn was able to acquire some nurse’s training. When Paris was liberated, she joined the French army and by January 1945 was working undercover. She went on a number of dangerous missions (principally to detect enemy troop locations) and after the war returned to nursing, including a stint in Indochina. She eventually married, raised a family, moved to California. If all is to be believed, Cohn was a remarkable woman: she chastised Nazis to their faces, intimidated the prisoners she interrogated, learned to drive a stick-shift in one hour, possessed a photographic memory, verbally chastened a would-be rapist so severely that he not only abandoned his assault but offered to marry her, attracted the amorous attentions of most of the men she met, was a crack shot, survived falls through the ice, bullets, tanks, and traitors. Meanwhile, the prose—with an assist from novelist Holden (Farm Fatale, 2002, etc.)—is not worthy of the subject. Bristling with clichés, the text features long passages of humdrum dialogue (recalled verbatim from a half-century ago?) and has all the stylistic sophistication of a YA novel.
A feebly written profile in courage. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-61054-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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