Though the kidnapping may have been unnecessary, Fermor loved adventure, and he recounts this one with heady enthusiasm.
The great travel writer recalls a daring mission during World War II.
In 1944, working as a British intelligence officer in Crete, Fermor (1915-2011) conceived a plan to kidnap a German general and spirit him away to Egypt for trial as a war criminal. The escapade, he was convinced, would demoralize the Nazi occupiers and raise the spirits of Crete’s resistance fighters. Fermor set his sights on Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, “The Butcher of Crete,” but when Müller was transferred, he chose Heinrich Kreipe, a career soldier who, the author later discovered, was so disliked that the kidnapping was celebrated with champagne in the officers’ mess. The adventure was first chronicled by Fermor’s comrade Billy Moss, whose account, published in 1950, later was made into a movie. More than 15 years later, Fermor decided to write his own version, drawing on war reports he sent to the Special Operations Executive headquarters. Excerpts (comprising about a third of the reports) append the text, as does a guide to the abduction route for military history fans who want to put on sturdy walking boots and follow the rough terrain. By 1966, Fermor was a much-published and praised writer, and his talents certainly are evident in this colorfully rendered tale. The actual kidnapping took little more than a minute, during which the perpetrators stopped the general’s vehicle, pulled the officer out roughly, bound and manacled him, knocked out his driver, and erupted in a “delirious excess of cheers, hugs, slaps on the back.” Transporting their quarry across the island to the sea was more arduous and perilous, involving trekking across snow-covered mountains, hiding in caves, and eluding the enemy. Military historian Roderick Bailey (Target: Italy: The Secret War against Mussolini, 2014, etc.), who provides the foreword, reports coolly that the kidnapping was unnecessary: German morale was already low, and the war had turned in the Allies’ favor.
Though the kidnapping may have been unnecessary, Fermor loved adventure, and he recounts this one with heady enthusiasm.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59017-938-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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