While segments about the writing of groundbreaking works like Naked Lunch and heroin-fueled binges in Tangiers and Paris are...
A ponderous revisiting of the strange and terrible life of the godfather of America’s Beat movement.
In this strange season for literary biographies, we’ve already worked through J. Michael Lennon’s warm but thorough portrait of a combative Norman Mailer and the controversial and revelatory Salinger, by David Shields and filmmaker Shane Salerno. William Burroughs (1914–1997) is an equally bizarre figure whose hallucinatory and experimental works of art and unpredictable journey rained influence down the generations from Jack Kerouac to Kurt Cobain. This wedge of biographical examination is no less doorstop-worthy but hardly the definitive biography of the mad genius of Lawrence, Kan. First of all, Miles (In the Seventies: Adventures in the Counterculture, 2011, etc.) carries some fairly weighty credibility, having known Burroughs and his contemporaries from 1965 on. However, the author has already exhaustively covered the Beat movement in numerous biographies, not least in William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (1993). Here, it’s seldom that we hear that laconic drawl and snarling wit that Burroughs carried into old age, which is clearly missed. Instead, Miles goes down the well-worn path of meticulously tracking his subject through time and place instead of through attitude and output. Even the pivot point of the novelist’s life—the 1951 misadventure in Mexico during which Burroughs shot and killed his wife—elicits little in the way of emotional insight into that furious whirlwind. Answers from a man the author knew and interviewed many times could have changed the way Burroughs is painted; pointing instead to a confessional sliver of text from the Tom Waits collaboration The Black Rider is avoidance.
While segments about the writing of groundbreaking works like Naked Lunch and heroin-fueled binges in Tangiers and Paris are satisfyingly voyeuristic, the biography is ultimately neither sensational enough to court controversy nor keen enough to be useful to future scholars.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1195-2
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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