A flimsy biography of the phenomenonally successful black author. The questions that come to mind after reading Patrick’s book have more to do with the nature of biography than with the nature of Terry McMillan. Is biography simply well-put-together research? If that’s the case, then Patrick’s work fits the bill, since there are facts to be picked up herein, such as where McMillan grew up and went to school, how many brothers and sisters she has, what she did for a day job while writing at night, and various other mechanics of how she came to be the first black woman author to have both a bestselling book and a box office hit with Waiting to Exhale. However, if the genre requires insight or a convincing argument that the life of its subject is relevant to readers, then this unauthorized biography falls short in any number of ways. Patrick gets off to a bumpy start with a defensive and occasionally whiny introduction that explains why the biography is unauthorized, which contains the usual reasons of the subject not wanting her biography written just yet and thus not participating in its creation. As the book continues, McMillan’s objections seem well justified, for not only is there little to be found here that could not be gleaned by reading her novels and a few interviews with her, but also what is here is written in a format that seems more suited to the adolescent reader than to the adults who are its probable consumers. Sentences describing McMillan’s ambition (“Maybe she could only afford water, but that didn’t stop her from looking at the soda bottles and visualizing!”) make it hard to think of this successful author as anything close to a real person. Curiosity about Terry McMillan would be better satisfied by reading her books. (8 pages b&w photos, unseen).
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20032-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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