Scrupulously researched but overly detailed.
The British biographer of Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling memorializes the chaotic and abbreviated existence of the 20th century’s most Romantic poet.
Born in 1914, in Swansea, Wales, to a socially ambitious schoolmaster and a voluble former seamstress, the precocious Dylan Thomas began writing sophisticated English poetry at the age of 10 or 12. In his teens, on summer visits to his mother’s Welsh-speaking relatives at Fernhill, the family farm for which one of his best-loved poems was named, he discovered rural Welsh traditions and began to mix English forms with Welsh images and rhythms, for which he later became famous. He also began to drink, and the drinking never slackened. At 22, after publishing his first book (18 Poems), he wed Caitlin Macnamara, the beautiful, wild, hard-drinking young mistress of painter Augustus John; and so began one of the era’s stormiest, most violent literary marriages. For the rest of Thomas’s short life, until his death from alcohol poisoning in Greenwich Village in 1953, he and Caitlin traveled, drank, fought, cadged money, cheated on each other publicly and obsessively, and made increasingly squalid scenes on three continents. That Thomas also created a body of masterful, if sometimes opaque, lyrical poetry and performed it beautifully on stage and radio explains his extraordinary and lasting popular notoriety. His best-known work, Under Milk Wood, not quite complete when he died, extended his life’s drama for a little while, as friends, handlers, and Caitlin all stormed his New York hotel room, vying for possession of the poet’s last, great work.
Scrupulously researched but overly detailed.Pub Date: June 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-541-5
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
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