For most of the last 14 years of his life, I.B. Singer was assisted by Telushkin, a bright young woman who, in this charming and often poignant memoir, recalls their relationship with striking candor. When Telushkin offered to drive the Nobel laureate to Bard College for the seminar he was teaching—in exchange for being allowed to audit the course—she never expected that he would agree, or that it would lead to a lengthy and turbulent professional and personal relationship with the last of the great Yiddish writers. The man she encountered was a natural charmer, an inveterate flatterer whose childlike demeanor could include the tantrums and dark moods of a spoiled child. Over the course of their time together, she went from being an unpaid chauffeur to serving as his secretary, amanuensis, and eventually a translator of some 20 of his short stories; she also became a close friend, frequent confidant, and surrogate daughter. Telushkin eventually found a second career for herself as a storyteller, and Master of Dreams is a storyteller's book; although it has a loosely chronological structure, it is really a series of thematically linked anecdotes, illuminating a complex, often disturbing character. In the course of his nearly 90 years of life, Singer abandoned or wounded nearly everyone he had been close to, from the son he ignored to his wife of 51 years. Telushkin is no exception, and much of the book's power comes from the excruciating deterioration of their friendship as the psychic demons that drove the writer combined with the no less potent hobgoblins of age and physical breakdown. But the portrait that emerges is by and large a loving one, often lovely to read, honest to a fault, and the man portrayed comes across as an admirable figure, albeit one with huge flaws. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-11866-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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