A fresh and fair assessment of Hemingway’s life and work that refreshingly avoids slipping into hagiography.
With the opening of Cuba’s Hemingway archives in Havana, a Hemingway scholar plunged into two years of research. The result is this original portrait of the author’s life and work.
Going to the “source” after “54 years of Cold War blockade,” New Orleans–based academic Feldman adds extensively to the already massive Hemingway archival material. Cuba—and, in particular, the Finca Vigía that he bought with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, in 1939—became the center of many things: his writing solace and success; his alternating marital bliss and torment (after Gellhorn, he brought Mary Welsh there, where they lived off and on until his suicide in Idaho in 1961); his heartfelt attachment to the locals and their families; his watering hole and source of fishing adventures; and the ultimate degradation in his health, mostly from drinking. Feldman engagingly traces Hemingway’s remarkable journey as an American writer and mythmaker on many levels. At the same time, he delineates the history of modern Cuba, especially the creation of Havana as a glamorous magnet for rich Americans while it festered in political turbulence, culminating in Fidel Castro’s consolidation of power in 1959. While the sordid details of Hemingway’s affairs, excessive drinking, and brutal treatment of family and friends are familiarly difficult to read, what remains in Feldman’s eloquent, evenhanded biography is a palpable sense of the author’s fierce allegiance to his work, which crushed everything that came in the way, including wives and devoted friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Papa’s demons, in the end, caught up with him, leaving many books (Islands in the Stream, A Moveable Feast, True at First Light) unfinished. Feldman concludes with a touching chronicle of how Castro revered the author ("All the work of Hemingway is a defense of human rights") and how the Cubans remember El Americano warmly to this day.
A fresh and fair assessment of Hemingway’s life and work that refreshingly avoids slipping into hagiography.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61219-638-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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