A fun collection for lovers of literature and travel.
A collection of letters from an endlessly fascinating writer and world traveler.
Using Dahl’s letters to his mother from age 8, when most British boys headed off to boarding school, until her death in 1967, British documentarian Sturrock (Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl, 2010) has picked just the right ones to show his character and his development into a fun-loving, globe-trotting adult. The only thing missing is some explanation of the schoolboy Briticisms—e.g., conkers, games of “fives” at school. In his letters to his mother, Dahl shared nearly everything, from his antics in school, good and bad, to his colonial life in Tanganyika, where life included a whole lot of drinking. The unfortunate loss of her letters to him causes Sturrock to assume and surmise her influence, but Dahl’s ability as an author is obvious in the tales he passes on to her. In 1940, he crashed his plane in the Libyan desert. Badly burned and with a severe concussion, he took months to convalesce in Alexandria. Rejecting an offer of repatriation to Britain, he healed enough to return to flying in Greece, although not for long. His headaches and blackouts finished his air career. In a clear case of knowing the right people, he was posted to Washington, D.C., as assistant air attaché in the British Embassy, where he met countless celebrities and even spent a weekend at Hyde Park. C.S. Forester asked him to write up a piece on the Royal Air Force, and when his publisher saw it, his career was launched. It was mostly smooth sailing after that, with articles in the Saturday Evening Post and a request from Walt Disney to come to California to write a book about the RAF. In addition to curating the letters, Sturrock provides a nice balance of context for each period.
A fun collection for lovers of literature and travel.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16846-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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