A vibrant biography that will surely entice readers back to the original source.
A highly sympathetic, knowledgeable portrayal strives to correct the “caricature” of this dynamic, brief life.
Having tracked his subject’s career since his scholarly research on London in the 1960s, Jack London Museum curator Labor (American Literature/Centenary Coll.; editor: The Portable Jack London, 1994, etc.) is an ideal biographer to capture the dazzling spirit and adventures of the acclaimed American author. London died at age 40 in 1916 from kidney disease and other debilitating conditions, having packed a great deal into a very short time, beginning with his teenage tramping days and stint digging for gold in the Klondike—experiences that provided the rich fodder for his “boys' ” stories and exciting animal tales like The Call of the Wild and White Fang. Thanks to his own self-promotion as the child of backwoodsmen and work as a voracious reader and wayfaring adventurer, legends swirled around London throughout his whole life and even death. As Labor fondly delineates, London did live large, seeming to be in a terrible hurry, starting with his childhood digestion of stories by Washington Irving, Poe, Stevenson and Kipling. He crammed his higher education into a few months and then restlessly took off again for the high seas, writing and speaking widely on socialist issues involving exploitation of the workers and social justice, diving into passionate love affairs and embarking on South Pacific adventures in his custom-made boat. All the while, London wrote like a fevered soul—1,000 words per day without fail—following what he called “the spirit that moves to action individuals and peoples, which gives birth and momentum to great ideas.” Labor grasps the fire and fight of this most American of authors.
A vibrant biography that will surely entice readers back to the original source.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-17848-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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