A punctilious and perceptive biography of Arthur Koestler, whose 1940 novel Darkness At Noon became part of the intellectual arsenal that eventually brought down the Berlin Wall. Koestler, claims Cesarani (History/Southampton Univ.), was a brilliant journalist and “an outstanding chronicler of his times.” He wrote novels, two volumes of autobiography, and countless essays. A man of the left and a member of the between-the-wars “pink” generation, he criticized the USSR and communism at a time when both were immensely popular and powerful, especially among the intelligentsia. Friendly with Sartre, Orwell, and Camus, he was also the quintessential Wandering Jew whose only real home was his mind. Though charming and kind, Koestler often quarreled with his friends and treated women abominably: He raped the wife of a good friend, was unfaithful to his own three spouses, and, Cesarani suggests, persuaded his much younger third wife to commit suicide with him in 1983 even though her health, unlike his, was good. Born in 1905 in Hungary, Koestler lived through a better childhood than his autobiography claimed, but his uncomfortable family, together with the dislocations of war and revolution, explained much of his subsequent behavior as well as his search for a permanent home. Attracted first to Zionism, he began his journalistic career in Palestine in the 1920s, then moved on to communism until his experiences in the USSR and the Spanish War changed his mind, and finally embraced parascience. Dealing with Koestler’s background, his writing, and his compulsive traveling, home-buying, and womanizing, Cesarani concludes that the writer’s “relationship with his Jewishness is fundamental to understanding the man and his work, and, by extension, the condition of post-modernity.” Both a splendid biography of one of the century’s great minds and a vivid history of the period, especially the years when revolution was in the air and totalitarianism on the rise.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86720-6
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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