Well-researched, comprehensive, and essential to understanding the artist and the artistry. (31 b&w photos, not seen)
A major new biography of the poet known for his fondness for the lower-case, the fractured word (and line), the idiosyncratic spelling, the prefix un-, the arresting phrase, and—later on—anti-Semitism.
Sawyer-Lauçanno (Writer-in-Residence/M.I.T.; The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1992, etc.) here takes on a most compelling subject. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) was the son of a powerful father—a Harvard professor, a Congregationalist minister, a man so handy he built houses—and an unfailingly supportive mother. He crafted careers in both poetry and painting, neither lucrative until near the end, and led a life with some moments so truly bizarre that they could have sated even today’s voracious tabloid-TV news. Cummings’s father was killed in a snowstorm when a train cut his car in half moments after he’d stopped to clear the windshield. Cummings had sexual relations and a child with a good friend’s wife, whom he subsequently married, then divorced. His daughter grew up not knowing the identity of her father, and when she met him years later, she felt an attraction . . . then learned the news. Traditional in design, the biography begins with the poet’s death, retreats to his birth, advances toward his death, ends with some paragraphs about his legacy. The volume, featuring as much praise as analysis, reads at times almost like a 19th-century “life.” Cummings was, declares the author, “a masterful lyric poet, and, quite simply, the master of the love poem.” Similar encomiums appear just about anytime Sawyer-Lauçanno discusses Cummings’s work. Moreover, until near the end, when he finally chides the poet, he suggests others were to blame for Cummings’s personal failings. When he abandons his role as apologist, however, the author has many bright things to say about the poems and their gifted creator.
Well-researched, comprehensive, and essential to understanding the artist and the artistry. (31 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57071-775-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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