The successor to Booknotes: Writers and Their Stories from C-SPAN’s Author Interviews (1997) is more unified and satisfying. Scouring ten years of interviews from his C-SPAN program, Lamb has assembled a collection of subjects spanning three centuries and two continents. While the emphasis falls on US statesmen and public figures (Will Rogers, Thomas Edison), international names like Marcel Proust and F.A. Hayek also appear, as well as a young heroin addict named Rosa Lee Cunningham. The focus on one genre unifies the work neatly, and insights into the subjects and biographers keep the work surprising. For example, Susan B. Anthony was a youthful beauty; Rutherford B. Hayes is an underappreciated president who prefigured the Progressive era; Calvin Coolidge was a fine writer, even in the opinion of Mencken. Common threads among the biographers are many. One is time invested: several years is not uncommon. Another is intimacy with the subject. The result for some, like Walter Isaacson (on Henry Kissinger), is equivocation: praise for Kissinger’s “ability to understand linkages in foreign policy,” but criticism of his shortsightedness in not grasping the power of “the openness and the values of our [democratic] system.” For others there is a fearful closeness. Sylvia Jukes Morris dreamed for months of her subject Clare Boothe Luce, with one dream making Luce a stripper in a vaudeville show, ready to expose herself as Morris was exposing her in the biography. But many left their books with increased respect for their subject. “I think I would have loved him,” said Denis Bryan of Albert Einstein. Concluded David McCullough of Harry S. Truman, “I would not only vote for him, I’d go out and work hard to see that he was elected. . . . He accomplished things.” Everyone in the book’subjects and biographers—accomplished things, and their endeavors make this book appealing. (Author tour,)
Pub Date: March 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8129-3081-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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