Some somber new brushstrokes darken an already dismal painting. (37 b&w illustrations)
Another examination of the passion, poetry, infidelity, depression, ambition, lies, and suffering that have made Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath the most notorious couple in modern literary history.
Middlebrook (Anne Sexton, 1991, etc.) did much research for this latest brick in the now-imposing edifice of material about Plath and Hughes. She examined the Hughes papers, now available to scholars at Emory University, as well as the Plath archive at Smith College. She refers early and often, as well, to Hughes’s two 1998 volumes dealing with Plath, Birthday Letters and the lesser-known Howls and Whispers, which appeared in an edition of 110 copies. Middlebrook endeavors to withhold judgment about Hughes’s behavior with Plath and her successors, but his actions as a serial adulterer speak quite eloquently. As does his poetry, from which the author quotes liberally. She speculates about the “disappearance” of some key Plath material, about the contents of a trunk at Emory that cannot be opened until 2023, and about the causes of Plath’s 1963 suicide. Her conclusion about the latter? Depression—hardly a novel insight. Middlebrook begins with the 1956 meeting of her two principals and then moves steadily forward to Hughes’s 1998 death from heart failure and cancer, though some chapters loop to revisit and modify earlier segments. The author makes insightful comments about each poet’s writing, about their individual artistic growth, and about their collaborations: before their break-up, in their impecunious days, they regularly read each other’s work and even composed at the same table. Middlebrook sensitively shows how each helped fashion the other, though some of her psychological observations sound a bit loopy, e.g., he is a “poet-shaman, journeying in the psychological murk of fear and detestation of the female.”
Some somber new brushstrokes darken an already dismal painting. (37 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03187-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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