Will appeal to Hemingway enthusiasts and readers of literary biography.
A mostly engaging examination of a marriage and its effect on American literature.
In addition to the detailed story of Ernest Hemingway’s second marriage, to Pauline Pfeiffer, Arkansas State University administrator Hawkins covers the novelist’s other marriages, the tense relationship Pfeiffer and Hemingway navigated after their divorce, their deaths and more. Pfeiffer met Hemingway in Paris. Though the relationship had a rocky start, the two fell in love, resulting in the end of Hemingway’s first marriage. The next 13 years were filled with travel, children and Hemingway’s rising career, all considerably bolstered by Pfeiffer family money. Hawkins pays special attention to this financial aspect of the story, arguing that money was at the very least an important factor, and probably the main one, in Hemingway’s decision to marry Pfeiffer. Regardless, the book shows Pfeiffer as a woman in love and content with her marriage and life until her husband moved on to be with someone else. Most of the narrative is absorbing, but Hawkins occasionally becomes bogged down in the details. Genealogies of both the Pfeiffer and Hemingway clans slow the pace, as do occasional off-topic anecdotes that may intrigue Hemingway enthusiasts but distract from the subject at hand. Though she paints Hemingway in a somewhat unflattering light, Hawkins doesn’t ignore his better qualities and includes episodes showing his soft, generous side when dealing with family and those close friends with whom he maintained lasting relationships.
Will appeal to Hemingway enthusiasts and readers of literary biography.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55728-974-2
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Univ. of Arkansas
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
