We’ve heard it all before, but it’s well worth hearing again.
A brief comparative study of the lives, works and attitudes of two great 20th-century authors.
Hardly an original work, Lebedoff (The Uncivil War: How a New Elite is Destroying Our Democracy, 2004, etc.) offers a series of linked analyses and speculations based on information readily available in standard biographies and related works about the worlds in which both men lived and did battle. This book’s premise and purpose, however, are distinctive, in that Lebedoff surveys his subjects’ histories as illustrative of their essential similarity, even oneness (hence his title), despite obvious differences in personality, social standing and worldviews. Waugh was a ferociously devout Catholic, Orwell an equally impassioned anti-communist and socialist “concerned entirely with this world…[while Waugh was preoccupied] with the next.” Lebedoff thus compares and contrasts Waugh’s celebrity-obsessed school experiences, abortive teaching career and disastrous first marriage with the stoicism exhibited by Eric Blair (before he adopted the famous nom de plume), who renounced any possibility of rising socially, joining the British civil service as a policeman stationed in Burma. Subsequently, there are juxtaposed considerations of each man's literary trials and triumphs; Waugh’s misadventures in Croatia as a scandalously unconventional officer and gentleman; the increasingly tubercular Orwell’s days as a Home Guard during the London Blitz; both men as husbands and fathers. Pages are filled by such risible expedients as a potted biography of the Mitford sisters, a needless summary of the overfamiliar plot of Brideshead Revisited and a labored analysis of this “masterpiece” and Orwell’s 1984 as each author’s grave Final Statement. Fortunately, both Orwell and Waugh are such engagingly stubborn and heroic figures that there’s no resisting such deservedly well-known anecdotes as Captain Waugh’s maliciously merry rumor-mongering insistence that Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito was a woman.
We’ve heard it all before, but it’s well worth hearing again.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6634-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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
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