An eclectic collection that illuminates the writing processes but too often feels incomplete.
Headlined by discussions with Lonesome Dove (1985) author Larry McMurtry and Watership Down (1972) writer Richard Adams, White’s (A Florida Anthology, 2013, etc.) selection of stories contains intimate sit-downs with authors from a wide range of genres.
This collection begins with the story of Harry Crews, a hard-drinking author whose real-life escapades heavily influenced his writing, though they might appear commonplace compared with those of other, more notorious literary figures. Crews provides keen insight into his writing process and troublesome past, but, since all the interviews occurred from 1979 to1984, they can feel outdated when the conversation shifts to his works being adapted for film and television: “. Crews will refuse to acknowledge The Gospel Singer if Tom Jones is cast as planned.” That outmodedness becomes a recurring situation during other interviews, with authors such as Frank G. Slaughter and Evan Hunter, which offer little new information about the lives of their subjects. The stories are most rewarding when White and the writers engage in philosophical discourse. Interviews with poet Richard Eberhart, behavioral psychologist and utopian theorist B.F. Skinner, and religious writer Chaim Potok particularly stand out as lively and deep. White often mimics the style of his subject, which keeps the writing fresh, and no story is more captivating than his interview with Calvin Hoffman, a leading voice for the theory that Christopher Marlowe was the true author behind Shakespeare’s works. Reading like a murder mystery, Hoffman’s devoted obsession with Shakespeare’s life and Marlowe’s vaguely reported death is shrouded in debate and wholly engrossing. Other interviews, however, fail to achieve the same tension. A discussion with actor Derek Jacobi—the only nonwriter—who acted in many Shakespeare plays, immediately follows the Hoffman interview but covers previously explored territory. Likewise, interviews with poet Kofi Awoonor and McMurtry run only a few pages before rushing to their respective conclusions, leaving readers wanting more.
An eclectic collection that illuminates the writing processes but too often feels incomplete.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492296515
Page Count: 172
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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