While Hoffman doesn't capture the full spectrum of his subject's achievements and disasters, he does convincingly picture...
This brisk double profile ably traces the career of America's greatest literary celebrity, ark Twain, while drawing a full portrait of his progenitor, Samuel Clemens.
For novelist and scholar Hoffman, Clemens was an insecure if sympathetically brilliant narcissist, desperate to rewrite his past and secure his future. Thus he created the Mark Twain persona: a masterstroke of self-creation and self-promotion that Hoffman considers nothing less than the "inspired ad-hoc invention of fame.'' Hoffman seeks to reconstruct what Clemens actually experienced before he edited and capitalized on his life. Thus, the Mississippi is the tragic scene of Clemens's father's doomed struggle to support his family. Hoffman illuminates several years of Clemens's life about which he never wrote, when his teenage rebelliousness led him to leave home and become an itinerant typesetter and newspaper columnist. A career as a riverboat pilot was interrupted by the Civil War, which Clemens sat out reporting for newspapers in Nevada and California. Hoffman deftly explores the romantic relationships with men that Clemens conducted in his years out west, placing them in the contexts of both boomtown mining culture and also the literary bohemianism that Clemens increasingly came to embrace. Local fame in San Francisco led to successful lectures in the east; soon Mark Twain's brilliant travel writing was earning top dollar. But adroit as the narrative of these years is, Hoffman's account of the creation of the great novels, particularly The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is thin, and by the time he reaches the eventual wreck of Clemens's investments and the tragic deaths of two of his daughters, his commentary has become less insightful. Even Clemens's final years as a terrifying iconoclast come off muted.
While Hoffman doesn't capture the full spectrum of his subject's achievements and disasters, he does convincingly picture Samuel Clemens's personality: a character interesting not least for his powerful ambivalence towards his astoundingly successful public alter ego.Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-12769-X
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
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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