by Jay Parini ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2004
Excellent portraits of Faulkner’s falls from various horses—and his determination, no matter how broken, to remount. (8 pp....
Some fresh evidence but a conventional treatment of the Yoda of Yoknapatawpha County.
As the author graciously acknowledges, anyone who writes about Faulkner (1897–1962) must pay homage (and assign many endnote numbers) to Joseph Blotner, whose two-volume Faulkner: A Biography (1974) remains foundational. But 30 years have passed, and Parini (Robert Frost: A Life, 1999, etc.) is an important and gifted biographer, and Faulkner, as Parini realizes, was a man with “many thousands of selves.” Here, Parini deals with the dominant ones. The organization is traditional (one would think Faulkner might inspire in his biographer some convolution, some multiple points-of-view): strictly chronological, with later chapters arranged in a common pattern—Faulkner’s personal life, the composition of his most recent book, the responses of the contemporaneous reviewers (Clifton Fadiman attacked virtually the entire canon of the future Nobel laureate), and then Parini’s own exegesis, sometimes animated (sometimes larded) with the commentary of other scholars. Parini deals directly with Faulkner’s human weaknesses—his alcoholism, his marital infidelities with ever-younger women (Parini is much more critical than Blotner of Estelle Faulkner, the writer’s wife), and his racial attitudes. As Parini notes, Faulkner’s comments during the 1950s sound uncomfortable to northern (or, maybe, humane) ears; he concludes that the great writer simply could not rise above his place and time—although he was considered racially radical in Mississippi. We see Faulkner in Oxford, Hollywood, New York, Charlottesville, the world. Like his rival Hemingway, he lied about his war record. But he was an accomplished horseman (despite many grievous falls later in life), an amateur pilot, an eager sailor, a voracious reader of novels. Parini shows in bright relief the fierce discipline that enabled Faulkner to produce major works in a short time (As I Lay Dying he wrote in 47 days) and recognizes the progressively declining quality of his work.
Excellent portraits of Faulkner’s falls from various horses—and his determination, no matter how broken, to remount. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621072-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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