Cyril Connolly (190374) was an aesthetic Georgian gadfly, and Fisher (Noâl Coward, 1992) relates in a fittingly tart, gossipy style his stingings and dartings about the Brideshead generation. Connolly's ambitions, whether literary, social, or romantic, pulled him in multiple directions throughout his life, and Fisher tellingly brings out the resulting contradictions, successes, and failures. Although an Anglo-Irish outsider and scholarship boy at Eton (along with his friend George Orwell), Connolly aspired to embody the Georgian era—ambivalent nostalgia for both an earlier England and his schooldays, modish affiliation with the Modernist avant-garde and salon Marxism, and snobbish Francophilia and Classicism. But after initial failure to fulfill his early promise, Connolly earned his reputation first as the enfant terrible book reviewer of the New Statesman in the late '20s, then as the founder and editor of the highbrow wartime journal Horizon, and lastly as a BBC speaker. Despite an irregular literary output (with marriages and friendships to match), he sedulously championed high art and culture in prose that elegantly negotiated its way around Bloomsbury ``Mandarin'' style, Leavisite sententiousness, and Fleet Street vernacular. Imprisoned in this critic, though, the artist signaled only sporadically to be let out, leaving behind some first-rate parodies and one novel out of a mass grave of abandoned fiction. But Fisher facilely subscribes to the view of Connolly as brilliant failure without seriously addressing critical works such as The Condemned Playground or The Evening Colonnade. Fisher is more drawn to his subject's quasi-biographic works and the agitation and admiration they stirred up among friends and coevals such as Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Ernest Hemingway. As a personal portrait rather than a critical survey, this biography captures the alternatingly charming and exasperating critic whom his backbiting friend Evelyn Waugh called ``the most typical man of my generation.'' (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13953-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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