Evocative, sharply drawn portraits and a wry, knowing narrative voice make for an engrossing history.
A summer of sun for despondent exiles.
In July 1936, the Austrian-Jewish writers Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and Joseph Roth (1894-1939) met in Ostend, Belgium, a seaside resort town that promised them a respite from the political turmoil perpetrated by Nazi Germany. As Weidermann, literary director and editor of the Sunday edition of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, portrays them in this taut, novelistic history, his first book to be translated into English, both men were facing personal and professional crises. Although Zweig was an enormously popular writer, his German publisher had just dropped him, and his latest book, on Calvin, elicited wrathful reviews. He wanted to wrest himself from his domineering wife and “dependent, needy, vain, useless” daughters to run off with his young, adoring mistress. Zweig was “tired, irritable, and depressed. He was sick of literature,” sick of politics, sick of life. Roth, who had been supporting himself as a journalist, was distraught when his two recent novels were banned and burned in his beloved Austria. An angry alcoholic, he yearned nostalgically for the past, for “an old Austria and its monarchy, its empire,” for “the great, glittering capital” of Vienna as it was in his youth. In lyrical prose, Weidermann re-creates the atmosphere of an ephemeral moment for both writers and the disillusioned men and women who gathered with them: German playwright Ernst Toller; Czech writer Egon Erwin Kisch, who was virulently anti-fascist; Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler; Zweig’s diffident lover Lotte Altmann; and Roth’s new lover, Irmgard Keun, a beautiful, feisty woman who had sued the Nazis for damages when her novels were banned (she lost). Weidermann’s focus, though, is on Zweig and Roth: Zweig, “self-confident, worldly, with a firm stride, like an elegant shrew in his Sunday best”; and Roth, dumpy, unkempt, “like a mournful seal that has wandered accidentally onto dry land.”
Evocative, sharply drawn portraits and a wry, knowing narrative voice make for an engrossing history.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87026-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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