Short on literary and historical perspective, Rayfield's exhaustive work nevertheless will be the definitive biography of Chekhov the private and family man. Rayfield, an established Chekhov scholar (Univ. of London), approached this project with a specific agenda: to offer an account specifically of his private life. Within this scope, Rayfield's goal is to provide a picture of Chekhov more complex than that suggested by other biographers or by the incomplete archival materials previously available. The cumulative impact of its 700 pages confirms Rayfield's claim that ``the complexity, selflessness and depth of the man become even clearer when we fully account for his human strengths and failings.'' This is a biography full of surprises. Although it is peppered with famous and colorful personalities such as the writers Gorky, Tolstoy, and Bunin, as well as figures from Russia's publishing and theater worlds, it is Chekhov's family members who make the most lasting impression: the tyrannical father, the bohemian and unreliable brothers, the dependent and jealous younger sister. The unexpected pleasure of Rayfield's biography is that the bountiful, sometimes overwhelming detail of Chekhov's private life—his own and his four siblings' habits, careers, movements, and finances—provide a fascinating and intimate look at this tendentious, temperamental family. As the extent to which Anton was his family's pivotal emotional figure and provider becomes clearer, one senses the value of Rayfield's endless evidence of financial arrangements, constant changes of domicile, and Anton's various real-estate adventures and debacles. The book suffers stylistically from too many mere listings. Still, Rayfield conveys what he succinctly states at the outset: Chekhov's life is, ``above all, a life enthralling for its own sake.'' Some may take issue with Rayfield's Joe Friday (``Just the facts, ma'am'') approach, but it will be difficult to fault or outdo his meticulous research. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5747-1
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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