A personal recollection and tribute that’s loaded with engaging historical tidbits.
A family memoir that focuses on the life of an intrepid young woman who left her family in Montenegro to become a dedicated Alaskan.
Radovic (Getting to Know the Manager, 2014) first met Vuka Stepovich, his great-aunt, when he visited her in Saratoga, California, in 1973, when he was 25 and she was 70. The author, born in Belgrade, Serbia, grew up listening to family tales about Vuka, who, in 1928, defied tradition and eloped with a much older man, Marko. He’d left his homeland decades earlier for California and eventually scored his own fortune in Alaska. After divorcing his first wife, he returned to the “Old Place” of Bay of Kotor, Montenegro, to find someone with whom to share his life. The timing was perfect, as Vuka had spent 10 years caring for her father and younger siblings after her mother’s death, and she was ready for escape and adventure. So began a love story that took her from the sunny Adriatic coast to the frigid, harsh Alaskan territory, which she embraced with enthusiasm. In 1942, she, Marko, and their four children moved to California, where Marko had begun his American dream, but they never gave up their Alaskan homestead. Even after Marko’s death in 1944, Vuka maintained their northern holdings, and by the ’70s, she was spending her summers up north. Although Radovic’s life work has been in international finance, he’s apparently inherited his family’s love of history. As a result, his slim memoir of his own family serves almost as well as a Slavic chronicle of times dating back to the Ottoman Empire and through two world wars. Overall, it is conversational in tone, with an occasional, pleasant quirkiness of phrasing as he traces the lineages, migrations, cultures, and religions of those who’ve populated the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea.
A personal recollection and tribute that’s loaded with engaging historical tidbits.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7965-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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