The author of The Little Girl Book (not reviewed) attempts in his adoring study to view eight American authors' lives and works in the context of their major literary friendships. Stating that his object is to explore ``epiphanic moments'' in the friendships of four pairs of writers, Laskin begins with Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, ``primordial gods, titans'' who shared a relationship that is, in this book, no less than archetypal. Beneath the cloying hero worship it's possible to discern a pair of talented but very human beings, with Hawthorne shrinking somewhat from the emotional heartiness of Melville's high regard. Similarly Edith Wharton, possessed of considerable wealth and commercial success, bowled over a somewhat jealous Henry James emotionally just as she swept him up in her fast, newfangled motorcars. Before their professional relationship blossomed into a personal one, Katherine Anne Porter promoted Eudora Welty's career but was not above feeling a twinge of jealousy at Welty's success with Delta Wedding while she struggled to produce Ship of Fools. Restrained Elizabeth Bishop and explosive Robert Lowell are depicted finding an uneasy common ground that is reflected in their poetry. Although these writers and their friendships are inherently interesting, Laskin treats his subjects as little more than celebrities, reading their works like tabloids to find clues to their lives (a technique that James pokes fun at in his story ``The Figure in the Carpet''). The worst moments are such random leaps into the bizarre as the author's speculation that Lowell, who died suddenly, might have ``interceded for Bishop from beyond the grave'' (because she died the same way) or his observation that Lowell's ongoing struggle with mental illness somehow marked him as a poet—Laskin's naivetÇ is cringe-inducing. A pedestrian effort that says little new or enlightening about these literary lives or the nature of friendship.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-72419-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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.
