Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.
Political activist Huber (Writing and Linguistics/Georgia Southern Univ.) combines original research, historical fiction and personal recollections in her attempt to connect with the anti-Nazi grandfather she never met.
Seeking an example of those who balanced activism, career and family as she struggled to do, the author traveled to the Ruhr region to study the life of her maternal grandfather—“Opa” in German—Heinrich (Heina) Buschmann Jr. Huber’s mother once called him a “nobody,” but he was in fact a tireless voice for the working class and a respected leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), a group caught between the extremes of Communism and Nazism. To discern this voice and “summon” her grandfather, Huber crafts fictional scenes from Heina’s life, interspersing them with passages about her own parallel experiences. Heina hands out leaflets for a parliamentary election; Huber protests the Iraq War. Heina considers leaving the party his father helped build when it supports rearmament; Huber devastates her immigrant mother by quitting college and joining an anarchist group. These echoes are occasionally forced, and the disparity between consequences for activists in a brutal dictatorship and those in a free-speech democracy sometimes makes the author’s examples seem trivializing. In addition to inhabiting Heina’s thoughts, Huber sets herself a further challenge in striving to understand his brother, Jupp, who joined Hitler’s elite guard, the SS. The narrative’s tension is undermined when historical passages are directly succeeded by commentary identifying them as fabrication. Even so, sharp human insights on the omnipresent moral complications of living in Nazi Germany make this a worthwhile read.
Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.Pub Date: March 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1080-6
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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
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