A highly readable biography that endeavors to correct, but not erase, the image of Malraux as a heroic, committed activist/intellectual. Malraux's youthful ``archaeological'' expedition to Cambodia, his anticolonial activities in Vietnam and China, his service with the Republican Air Force during the Spanish Civil War, his acclaimed novels, his underground activities for the French Resistance, and his postwar political career as de Gaulle's minister of culture—all would seem to suggest a uniquely romantic and large-scale life. Cate, to his credit, tries not to swallow unreservedly the conventional version promulgated by Malraux and his friends. For instance, the 22-year-old Malraux's expedition to Cambodia was largely, it turns out, an attempt to loot temple statuary. Cate (George Sand, 1975, etc.) gives a detailed, colorful, and slightly skeptical account of the unscrupulous venture. This episode might seem an unusual prelude to the anticolonial journalism Malraux began writing soon after, or to his radical fictionalization of the 1925 Cantonese insurrection in The Conquerors. But as Cate shows, such about-faces were a part of Malraux's character: His need for danger, risk, and adventure mingled with his desire to champion causes and to live life on a heroic scale. Cate's reading of Malraux's character seems persuasive when applied to many of his labors, including his efforts on behalf of the French Communist Party and his activities during the Spanish Civil War. His account of Malraux's life in the Resistance, working for both British intelligence and the French maquis, is the book's high point, providing fresh details and a thrilling narrative. The biography levels off afterward, but so did Malraux's political and intellectual drive, though his personality remained enthralling and enigmatic right up to his death in 1976. The real Malraux remains inextricably tied up with the legend, and somewhat obscured by it. Cate provides a rich account of both. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-88064-171-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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