In this penetrating biography, Todd, a French journalist and author, clarifies the greatness of the Nobel Prizewinning author while also pointing out toes of clay. Born into poverty in Algeria, Camus managed, under the tutelage of two dedicated teachers, to educate himself and become one of the leading moral voices of this century. Todd's account traces the development of Camus's mature thought during his editorship of the Resistance paper Combat during WW II and after, in the battles over ``purifying'' the country of Nazi collaborators (``We will maintain freedom, even if it profits those who fought against it,'' he said, opposing summary justice). Todd conveys both Camus's intense appetite for life, his sensuality and vitality—for playing soccer, for the air and sea of his beloved Algeria—his confidence and also his self-doubt, his feeling of entrapment in his marriage and the consequent inability to remain faithful to his devoted but needy wife, Francine. Todd sagely attributes this to the need ``to fight a certain vertigo made up of fear and illness and death''—he suffered from serious, recurrent bouts of tuberculosis. The genesis of his great works, from The Stranger to the unfinished novel, The First Man, the evolution of his ideas on absurdity, revolt, and freedom, are ably explored, as are Camus's often lonely positions among the French intellegentsia—never an ideologue, he was against Stalinist totalitarianism, against Arab terrorism in the struggle for Algerian independence. Todd's writing (or perhaps just its translation) is not notably graceful, and he can be evenhanded almost to a fault in his portrait of Camus; one wishes for a little less dispassion in his concluding remarks on the writer's lasting significance. (Knopf, however, has set a very bad precedent for serious nonfiction by omitting the end notes, which appeared in the French version, from this edition.) Still, this is a satisfying portrait of a man whose ideas on freedom, nationalism, and violence are as necessary today as they were half a century ago.
Pub Date: Dec. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42855-0
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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