For the Wilson completist, though those who remember Hecate County as a dirty book may be interested, too.
Ah, a critic in love: what every book reviewer yearns to be. Edmund Wilson was no ordinary reviewer, of course. And as for those he loved, well, there was Edna Millay, and Elinor Wylie, and Mary McCarthy, and . . .
Wilson has been coming in for critical reappraisal lately, and Lewis M. Dabney’s Edmund Wilson (2005) has drawn new attention to the eminent journalist and author. Wilson biographer Castronovo and literary scholar Groth contribute marginally to that reawakening of interest with this small book, which revisits what every serious reader of Wilson knows: that Wilson chased just about every woman he saw. Though he was, as McCarthy said, “no Adonis,” portly and bald Wilson had quite good luck in luring women into his lair, the better to memorialize them in his journals. Thus he was ever wooing women of every description and class, even as an old man being alternately pitied and used (as by one flower child who “allowed a lot of kissing…accompanied by her doing some skinny dipping in his presence”). When Wilson was on top of his game—and a regular diet of booze didn’t seem to keep him from it—he was full of self-regard, when not he was full of self-pity. An obsessive self-chronicler, Wilson kept careful notes on every mood and aspect of his love life—so that, in the end, this book seems both a touch voyeuristic and more than a touch unnecessary, since its contents are to be found (absent a few expurgations filled in here) in other sources.
For the Wilson completist, though those who remember Hecate County as a dirty book may be interested, too.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-59376-050-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
