Next book

ENCOUNTERS WITH AUTHORS

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into his writing process and troublesome past, but, since all the interviews occurred from 1979 to1984, they can feel outdated when the conversation shifts to his works being adapted for film and television: “.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

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview