A long, unblinking look in time’s mirror, by a writer who has spent his life mastering his subject and his craft.
A sometimes poignant, sometimes nasty, often amusing and always erudite memoir by the historian and art critic (Goya, 2003, etc.).
Hughes begins his account with near-death (a 1999 car crash in Australia), ends with the beginnings of his professional life in 1970 (aboard a plane from Rome to New York City, where he will begin his long tenure as art critic for Time magazine). In between are stories about his family (the Hugheses had some prominence Down Under; his father was a heroic pilot in WWI), about his fierce Roman Catholic schooling (it didn’t take), the genesis of his love of art, his decision to leave Australia, his loves and losses and failed marriage, his European travels, his gradual emergence as a writer, his relationships with artists and publishers and the BBC (for whom he freelanced). At times, Hughes is gleefully self-deprecating, no more so than during his protracted tragi-comic account of his marriage to a woman who, throughout their relationship, apparently slept with just about every weirdo in London (and elsewhere) in the ’60s, including Jimi Hendrix, whose contribution to Hughes family harmony was a case of the clap. “I was a cuckold going cuckoo,” he laments. The author also skewers and grills a number of folks and phenomena and fashions—from Tiny Tim to Irwin Shaw (who once stole Hughes’s girlfriend) to Easy Rider to what he views as the entire anti-intellectual, superficial, hyper-religious, ultra-phony, trashy, celebrity-besotted American culture of today. Some highlights: the merry mortars he launches against the Australian press, his stories about Catholic boarding school, his account of Florence’s disastrous 1966 flood, his flops as a writer (he couldn’t finish a book on da Vinci), his swift report about his courtship by Time. (An error: Polonius is addressing Laertes, not Hamlet, when he says “to thine own self be true.”)
A long, unblinking look in time’s mirror, by a writer who has spent his life mastering his subject and his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4444-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
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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