More somber than funny but an eye-opening look at a place that doesn’t figure on most travelers’ bucket lists.
The peripatetic Briton journeys behind the most unyielding of iron curtains.
“The only advice which really saddens me is the one which seems to strike at the very essence of traveling,” writes Palin (Erebus: The Story of a Ship, 2018, etc.)—namely, the warning that a foreigner in North Korea shouldn’t try to mix with the ordinary people. That, of course, is the author’s stock in trade, and it surprised him and his crew to find that in many instances, their North Korean handlers, true believers though they may have been, accommodated them in such matters as taking meals in ordinary restaurants filled with working-class (and highly bibulous) citizens. Palin’s travelogue contains much that is expected, though with his lightly learned way of putting things, as when he writes of crossing the border from China over the Yalu River: "A socialist market economy slips away and a largely unreformed command economy starts to emerge between the flashing black beams of the bridge.” His travels included a brief visit to the sacred highest peak in the land, the vision of which was marred by a vast statue to an earlier dictator in the Kim lineage. Palin is not quite as funny here as he usually is, but that’s small wonder given that he is chronicling his travels to one of the grimmest places on the planet, if one with its own surrealisms—e.g., a statue that depicts, among other heroically revolutionary figures, “two women looking heavenwards, one of them carrying a chicken, the other a television.” Still, one has to smile at the thought of the author showing a video of the famed Monty Python sketch known as the Fish-Slapping Dance to a bewildered audience, a member of which was concerned with whether the large fish in question was alive. Palin also works in a nice sidelong reference to Life of Brian.
More somber than funny but an eye-opening look at a place that doesn’t figure on most travelers’ bucket lists.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-7982-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Penguin Random House Canada
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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