The sins of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens’ poignant book sheds new light on the history of...
A generational memoir of war and its long-lasting effects on descendants.
History, the old saying goes, is written by the victors. The fortunes of the losers often go unnoticed, particularly if the losers are associated with a bad cause. So it was in the case of one side of Eerkens’ family, her grandfather a member of a Dutch nationalist party with ties to the Nazi occupiers. She writes dolefully of discovering an article of his that she turned up in the National Library, “someone who supposedly had Jewish colleagues and friends whom he spoke highly of, writing clearly anti-Semitic, racist nonsense for a racist NSB publication.” Understandably, that grandfather did not wish to discuss his past, and the author’s mother was too young to comprehend events, though her older siblings recalled being shunned and cursed by their neighbors. On the other side of the family and politics was her father, imprisoned with his family in the Dutch East Indies; Eerkens focuses closely on the fact that the Japanese military ran “brutal labor camps for civilian prisoners including women and children,” to terrible effect. The author examines the psychology of loss on the part of children caught helplessly in tumultuous events. In the case of her parents, who met as adults after the war and raised their family in California, their experiences lingered in large and small things—e.g., her mother’s frugality, explained by her aunt with the meaningful phrase, “we aren’t just automatically entitled to nice things.” Privations and fears became ancestral memories “imprinted on my genes.” Eerkens’ work takes on a particularly timely note when, in closing, she notes the rise of a new wave of nationalism, a time when “people I know and care about have endorsed candidates and political positions that I find unconscionable,” reverberating again through the generations.
The sins of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens’ poignant book sheds new light on the history of World War II.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11779-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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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