Bearing lightly its torrents of references, this examination of the character and career of the iconoclastic writer is as...
Comprehensive, authoritative biography of Roald Dahl (1916–1990).
Sturrock, a filmmaker who worked with his subject on two documentaries in the 1980s and is now artistic director of the Roald Dahl Foundation, crafts an orderly narrative. He first examines incidents and figures in Dahl’s ancestry that he judges significant, then retraces his subject’s schooling, exploits as an RAF pilot, suave diplomatic attaché and (as a friend puts it) “one of the biggest cocksmen in Washington,” and finally follows his progress from moderately successful writer of comically macabre short stories for adults to renowned creator of outrageously edgy fantasies for younger readers. Dahl’s outsized personality fills these pages as it evidently filled any room he occupied. The author was opinionated, fond of arguments and celebrity friendships or affairs, prone to ferocious attacks on any publisher or editor deemed insufficiently respectful of his work and strongly dedicated to his family—a quality seen most notably in his orchestration of a relentless (successful) rehabilitation program for his wife-at-the-time Patricia Neal after her stroke. Sturrock’s comments on his subject’s literary works are more descriptive than analytical, but he defends Dahl against charges of racism in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and anti-Semitism elsewhere, and also catalogs most of the many errors and outright fabrications in Dahl’s two volumes of memoirs.
Bearing lightly its torrents of references, this examination of the character and career of the iconoclastic writer is as perceptive as it is dishy and exciting.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5082-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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