A biography notable for its deep research.
The enigmatic novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) inspires a new investigation.
In his literary debut, Hull (Spanish & Latin American Studies/Univ. of Chester) minutely examines the plot, characters, context, creation, reception, filming, and afterlife of Greene’s 1958 satirical novel, Our Man in Havana. Drawing on Greene’s published and unpublished writings; studies and biographies of Greene; abundant archival material; and his own 17 visits to Cuba, Hull sets Greene’s life amid Cuba’s tumultuous history. Compared to “the Hemingway cult in Havana,” Greene’s “many visits to his preferred watering and feeding hole,” Hull laments, have gone unacknowledged. He aims to correct this oversight by meticulously documenting every step that Greene took, every diary entry he logged, and every letter he wrote to his wife and several mistresses concerning his many visits to Cuba and the writing and filming of his novel. Despite Hull’s valiant efforts, though, his portrait of Greene is overly familiar: a troubled man, restless, self-absorbed, and moody, a manic-depressive who sought relief from his “tormented self” (as well as his many romantic crises) by traveling to “risky, seedy, and distant troubled locations.” Among the seediest was pre-Castro Cuba, reputed to be “an uninhibited tropical paradise,” where gambling casinos, brothels, bars, and risqué nightclubs flourished. Beginning in 1954, with an unplanned two-night detour to Havana, Greene, with his “magnetic attraction to seediness,” partook of all Cuba’s offerings, including copious alcohol and illicit drugs. During many of his visits, Greene had little contact with Cubans, and the idea for Our Man in Havana originated, Hull reveals, in 1944, when a Brazilian film director asked Greene for a film outline and Greene decided to write a Secret Service comedy based on his own wartime observations. Although he did not draw on Cuban politics to represent duplicity and bungling among agents and politicians, Hull asserts that the novel reflected Cold War paranoia and proved prescient in its foreshadowing of the Cuban missile crisis.
A biography notable for its deep research.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-018-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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