A blend of family history and world history that starts out strong—the Russian years are by far the most compelling—but runs...
The life of a Russian grandmother, a woman in the wrong places at the wrong times.
Using family memorabilia, the recollections of friends and relatives, plus newspaper files and historical archives, British journalist Williams (Hongkong Bank, 1989, etc.) has pieced together a large portion of the life of her grandmother, Olga Yunter, who was born in 1890 in Siberia and died in 1973 in England. The homely details of life in Siberia in the early-20th-century fill the first chapters, but WWII and the Russian Revolution brought uncertainty, death and chaos, changing Olga’s life forever. After two of her brothers were killed in 1919, her father gave her a handful of rubies and gold nuggets to sew into her clothing, put her on a horse and sent her east to Vladivostok. Within a few months she was on the run again, this time to Tientsin, China, a city filled with Russian refugees also fleeing from the Reds. There, she learned English, and in 1923 married a young Englishman, Fred Edney, thereby gaining a certain security. Olga began transforming herself into a proper English housewife, one who was not, however, quite acceptable to Fred’s family back in England. Home leaves, granted every five years by Fred’s employer, were disappointing affairs. Still, life in the European sectors of Tientsin and later Shanghai was comfortable and relatively safe until 1940, when Japan signed a military alliance with Italy and Germany. Staying in China then became too dangerous, and once again, Olga was on the run, this time to Canada, where friends had offered refuge. The author gives scant coverage to the WWII years, to Olga’s 1945 reunion with her husband, interned by the Japanese, or to their subsequent life in Shanghai. By 1948, Communist forces were advancing, and Olga and her husband again fled, eventually finding sanctuary in England.
A blend of family history and world history that starts out strong—the Russian years are by far the most compelling—but runs out of steam long before Olga does.Pub Date: June 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50851-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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