A sad phenomenology of human degradation.
A former prisoner of Auschwitz recounts his experience in the camp and his hellish transformation into what he calls an “extermination-camp man”—a human sub-species focused solely on survival and lacking all feelings and the attendant care for others.
At 16, the author was a spoiled teenager living in Paris who loved science, mathematics, and gambling. His childhood had been difficult, full of upheaval as his family moved around Europe: not close to his parents, and not resident anywhere long enough to make real friends, he became a self-sufficient individualist. He was multilingual, adaptable, and familiar with unpleasant changes—all factors that helped him survive the brutality of Auschwitz (where strength, luck, and “the flexibility of a contortionist” were required). Steinberg freely formed alliances with the hardened criminals who were running the camp, who could dispense extra food or other favors. “I concluded that each of these monsters had a flaw, an Achilles heel, which it was up to me to find: this one needed flattering, that one had a repressed paternal instinct or the need to confide in someone who seemed to take an interest in him.” At one point, sick with dysentery and scabies (which cause painful skin ulcers), he concluded that, for all intents and purposes, human relations had ceased to exist and he didn’t even know his own bunkmate. Later, he used his basic knowledge of chemistry to bluff his way into a laboratory assignment in the I.G. Farben factory where prisoners were forced to work. In the lab, he met Primo Levy—who later was to describe Steinberg as a soulless manipulator, an animal obsessed only with his continued existence. Ultimately, Steinberg agrees with this assessment, and admits that he doesn’t even remember meeting Levy—“perhaps because I hadn’t felt he could be useful to me.”
A sad phenomenology of human degradation.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6064-2
Page Count: 163
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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