An informed mind and heart, a generous spirit—these are the human qualities that emerge on virtually every page of this...
An eclectic, entertaining and shelf-bending collection of essays, memoirs, introductions, diaries and commentary from the noted English actor, playwright and art-lover.
In his introduction, Bennett (Writing Home, 1995, etc.) alludes to the colon cancer he battled in the late 1990s, and he concludes this massive and moving anthology with an essay about that experience—one of the strongest of many strong pieces. He quips, “Sometimes I felt that more people had seen the inside of my bum than had seen some productions at the National Theatre.” This appealing self-deprecation is a hallmark of Bennett’s prose, including his opening essay, a long piece about a number of his relatives—but with a sharp focus on the mental deterioration of his mother. Bennett also writes about his first awareness that he was gay (including a touching moment with his father, who asks, “You’re not one of them, are you?”). Bennett includes segments from his diary (1996–2004), with comments on the deaths of many of his friends and coevals—among them, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, John Schlesinger and Alan Bates. He comments, as well, on the death of Princess Di, 9/11, the Iraq War (which he despises). There are a couple of very compelling sections about the plays he’s written (for stage, radio, film and television), and some essays about another of his loves—paintings. (In his diary, he chronicles visits to galleries all over the world.) There’s also an interesting text of a speech in which he identifies four paintings that ought to hang in every English school. Bennett loves the poetry of Philip Larkin, and that poet’s name and words pop up frequently in these pages. Among the best pieces is “Staring Out of the Window,” a brief, lucid essay about writing. Another very strong and troubling essay deals with a physical assault he suffered in 1992.
An informed mind and heart, a generous spirit—these are the human qualities that emerge on virtually every page of this splendid collection.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-28103-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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