A richly rewarding view of an unconventional woman's eloquence, intellect, and passion over the course of five decades. Warner (18931978), a British author best known for her short stories in the New Yorker and her novels Lolly Wilowes and Mr. Fortune's Maggot, vividly documented everything in her life from the mundane to the monumental. These diaries recall her teas with musicians and authors; gardening; thoughts on politics and writing (her own and others', such as her controversial contemporary Radclyffe Hall's); her lesbianism and love for poet Valentine Ackland; and the crushing grief of Ackland's death. What emerges is a portrait of a romantic, versatile, and clever woman with a novelist's eye and a poet's ear—a delightful character to encounter whether or not one is familiar with her fiction. Her early entries are lighthearted. Here she is on a lousy day's work: ``I wrote like an old flock mattress''; or on two languorous weeks of writing, socializing, and gardening: ``a peaceful fortnight of ladylike behavior''; or on her utterly untortured creative process: ``In the late afternoon I suddenly found myself with poem . . . It was odd to be shot into that feeling again, that deliberate trance, without a word of warning.'' Her initial years with Ackland are filled with adventures and high spirits until 1949, when Ackland began an affair with another woman. But most profound are the entries from the decade between the onset of Ackland's terminal cancer and Warner's own death in 1978, in which Warner heartrendingly recalls ``the sensual freedom of the days before calamity.'' These portions powerfully evoke the pain of lost love, a pain heightened by Warner's vigilant return to their love letters and blunted only by whisky and writing. With deft editing, Harman, her biographer, has both illuminated Warner's day-to-day existence and allowed the woman's vitality and grandeur to speak for themselves.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-85381-885-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Collins & Brown/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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