A useful addition to Sybille Bedford’s two-volume authorized life of Huxley, drawing on letters and memoirs that have...
Capable biography capturing the English writer in his many guises: artist, aesthete, acidhead, even happy and well-loved man.
Born in 1894, Huxley died on the day JFK was assassinated; understandably, news of his passing was buried deep inside the papers, and soon he was all but forgotten save as a kind of psychedelic prophet, thanks to his consciousness-expanding experiments with LSD and mescaline in the 1950s. But in his time he had acquired considerable fame for such fiction as Point Counter Point and After Many a Summer Dies a Swan, better liked by general readers than critics. In between his many novels, Huxley wrote travel journalism, essays, and eccentric philosophy that blended his psychotropic voyages with the wisdom of the East by way of southern California (“Like everyone else,” he wrote, “I am functioning at only a fraction of my potential”). Only a few of his 50-plus books are now in print, though he is well-known for (and, really, only for) the dystopian Brave New World. Murray makes a good case for Huxley’s value as a writer on a level with at least some of the Bloomsbury crowd; Virginia Woolf, it happens, was an early champion, though she warned in print that “we would admonish Mr. Huxley to leave social satire alone, to delete the word ‘incredibly’ from his pages, and to write about interesting things that he likes.” His biographer also finds reason to criticize Huxley’s work (as did the self-aware author himself) for its didacticism and undervaluing of plot and drama in favor of proselytizing on such matters as the generation gap and the dangers of totalitarianism. Nonetheless, Huxley emerges from Murray’s pages as a decent, contented, and pleasant person whose life and work merit our regard.
A useful addition to Sybille Bedford’s two-volume authorized life of Huxley, drawing on letters and memoirs that have surfaced in the 30 years since its publication.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30237-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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