Part biography, part memoir, Wells' work does much to humanize the man who is often remembered only for his words. A...
Girlhood memories from Wells, William Faulkner’s niece.
In her debut memoir, the author recounts her childhood spent among literary greatness. After her father perished in a plane crash, Dean Faulkner was taken in by her uncle, William, a man “of many faces, literary genius, desperate alcoholic subject to severe bouts of depression, driven early on by the unassuaged fear of failure…” Yet as Wells notes, the acclaimed author was far more complicated than his vices, regularly providing “emotional and financial” support for his young niece, playing the role of loving father. “[M]y family can claim nearly every psychological aberration,” she writes of the Faulkner clan, yet few pages are spent dissecting the “narcissism and nymphomania, alcoholism and anorexia, agoraphobia, manic depression [and] paranoid schizophrenia” to which she alludes. Instead, the author provides insight into the personal life of Faulkner, a rare glimpse into Faulkner the uncle rather than Faulkner the wordsmith. The author eschews discussion of literary theory, instead recounting New Years Eves and Halloweens spent beneath the boughs of Rowan Oak and stories of her “Pappy” (her pet name for her uncle) telling ghost stories to his young relatives, complete with clanking chains at the climactic moments. Wells’ personal tales are the highlight of her book. On occasion, her side stories that explore other branches of the Faulkner family tree tend to veer off course, serving as distraction rather than enlightening anecdotes. The author is at her best when she fixes her gaze solely on her uncle.
Part biography, part memoir, Wells' work does much to humanize the man who is often remembered only for his words. A must-read for Faulkner-philes.Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59104-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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
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