Readable, if incomplete, account of a national treasure.
A friend and noted scholar of the graciously skilled Southern author fashions a beaming, hefty salute to her long, fruitful life.
Marrs (English/Millsaps Coll.) takes issue with Ann Waldron’s unauthorized biography (Eudora, 1998), which depicted the author as a “charming and successful ugly duckling,” and with Claudia Roth Pierpont’s equally reductive New Yorker portrait of “a perfect lady—a nearly Petrified Woman.” This weightily detailed volume emphasizes Welty’s restless vitality and openness to new experience. The author does not deal in psychoanalytical fine points. In her account, Welty (1909–2001) had a happy childhood in Jackson, Miss., sheltered by adoring parents with whom she would live well into her adult years, but broadened by travel, especially to New York City. Moving from photography, her first love, to fiction, Welty encountered success fairly early and by 1936 saw the publication of her first story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” along with an exhibition of her photographs at a New York gallery. She gradually built up a repertory of exquisitely crafted stories, published as A Curtain of Green in 1941, and garnered a close working relationship with the literary names that would mentor and sponsor her, such as Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, William Maxwell and loyal agent Diarmuid Russell. Welty overcame the crushing disappointment of never marrying her hometown beau, John Robinson, whose inferior literary talent and conflicted sexuality drove him from her by middle age. Gracious to younger talent, she was instrumental in promoting the work of others, such as Reynolds Price. Marrs tenderly asserts that Welty enjoyed an independent life characterized by “the presence of melancholy intertwined with joy.” However, her reluctance to make autobiographical suppositions about her subject’s work leaves this volume faintly dry and ethereal.
Readable, if incomplete, account of a national treasure.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-100914-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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