A candid, intimate and touching portrait of the author's masculine forebears, composed in nimble prose.
A sprightly memoir about the succession of cranky, writerly Waugh men, concluding with the author (born 1963).
The most famous Waugh was of course Evelyn, author of Brideshead Revisted and many other novels, who died in 1966. Older brother Alec was notorious for his novel The Loom of Youth (1917); son Auberon (Alexander’s father) was a well-known journalist for the Daily Telegraph for nearly 40 years. Alexander, member of the family’s fourth generation of authors and critics, writes frankly and sweepingly of the often deeply ambivalent feelings between Waugh fathers and sons. He begins with “the Brute”: sadistic, Victorian Dr. Alexander Waugh, a country doctor who bullied son Arthur for his asthmatic weakness. Arthur, in turn, grew passionate about dramatics and a literary career, established himself in London and was eventually noted for his literary criticism and work as a managing director of Chapman and Hall. The careers of Arthur’s two sons form the most compelling chapters here; favorite Alec and irritable Evelyn are portrayed in knee-slapping good stories that spare no one’s feelings. Expelled from Sherborne for homosexual activity, Alec enjoyed some early literary successes but was forced to recognize that his younger brother was the better writer. Evelyn, despite great professional and financial successes, never quite won his father’s love, and indeed waged continual, patricidal literary war against him. Auberon, Evelyn’s first-born son, developed a hatred for discipline and became an accomplished liar. He died in 2001, and Alexander describes his final days with great pathos: “I had not kissed my father since I was twelve years old and had never said ‘I love you’ to him, even as a boy…we never, in all our time together, had a single serious conversation. He had not trained me for it.”
A candid, intimate and touching portrait of the author's masculine forebears, composed in nimble prose.Pub Date: May 29, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52150-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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