Conor Cruise O'Brien may or may not be ``the greatest living Irishman'' or ``the most important Irish nonfiction writer of the 20th century,'' but he has certainly found a splendid biographer in historian Akenson (History/Queen's Univ., Ontario). Born in 1917, O'Brien could seemingly do everything but math. He supported himself with prizes at university; wrote literary criticism; was on the fast track in the Irish Foreign Office until he jumped off it, carrying out too exactly the unattributable wishes of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjîld; was vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, a New York academic, an Irish Cabinet minister, editor-in-chief of The Observer, and the author of seminal books on Ireland and Edmund Burke. Along the way he became the enfant terrible of the UN, not only revealing in his To Katanga and Back how it worked but doing it in such entertaining fashion that Akenson calls it ``the first successful picaresque novel of postcolonial Africa, but...a novel that is built almost entirely of fact.'' He showed enormous courage in Ireland, denouncing the constitutionally asserted right of the South to exercise jurisdiction over Ulster as ``essentially a colonial claim'' and campaigning ceaselessly against the romanticization of violence. It would be surprising, in a life devoted to journalism and crusades of one kind or another, if O'Brien had not gone off the rails from time to time as he did in the late 1960s: His castigation of Western imperialism as ``one of the greatest and most dangerous forces in the world today'' and his statement that containing communism was one of the greatest dangers to world peace suggest his limitations. But his courage, his honesty, his restless mind, and his eloquent writing assured him of a wide audience, and his States of Ireland and The Great Melody have both been remarkably influential books, the latter, according to Akenson, ``among the great biographies of the 20th Century.'' This, too, is a very fine biography, full of wit, verve, candor, and a critical appreciation of its subject.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8014-3086-0
Page Count: 563
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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