Not a fun read, but a wonderfully crafted portrait of a tormented homosexual writer.
A revealing biography of the brilliant, arrogant author of The Gallery (1947), a celebrated World War II novel.
John Horne Burns (1916–1953) grew up in a wealthy New England family and attended Harvard, where he began a lifetime of drinking that ended in lonely days as a regular at a hotel bar in Italy, where he died an embittered drunk at age 36. He attended and taught at Loomis, a prep school outside Hartford, Conn. As a student there many years later, Vanity Fair contributor Margolick (Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, 2011, etc.) became fascinated by the forgotten author whose Lucifer with a Book (1949), a vicious novel about Loomis, was forbidden reading at the school. Years later, Margolick encountered The Gallery, about U.S. soldiers in occupied Naples in 1944–1945, “perhaps America’s first great gay novel.” Even Margolick’s warning that Burns was a difficult man to like does not fully prepare readers for this story of an obnoxious, hypercritical, mean-spirited loner. For all his negativity, however, Burns was able to write his life-embracing The Gallery, a compassionate view of characters passing through a vast arcade, including gays in uniform. Always arrogant, Burns had nonetheless become more open-minded and decent as a result of his wartime experiences that inform the novel. Sensitive, well-researched and drawing nicely on the novelist’s vivid letters, the book covers Burns’ abnormally close relationship with his heiress mother; his years as a student and, later, disgruntled teacher at Loomis; his wartime postings in North Africa and his beloved Italy; and his career as an author, from the ecstatic acclaim for his war novel, to the poor reviews of later works, to his rivalry with Gore Vidal, who called Burns “a gifted man who wrote a book far in excess of his gift.”
Not a fun read, but a wonderfully crafted portrait of a tormented homosexual writer.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59051-571-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
PROFILES
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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