Wilson kept extensive journals and diary entries for the entire decade of the 50's and these excerpts—beautifully edited by Edel—offer his trademark blend of crotchetiness and literary acumen. This decade opened with the death of Edna St. Vincent Millay (a former flame) and closes with Wilson's 65th birthday. Wilson's mood actually improved as he passed age 61 (the age at which his father had died). Happily married to his fourth wife, comfortably shuttling between two houses (one on Cape Cod, the other in upstate New York), Wilson was a rover no more. These journals breathe an atmosphere that Edel's introduction rightly calls "contented": "Wilson's mood is classical; he might be a writing Roman with his large senatorial head and thick body, escaping from the Imperial City for rustication." The liveliest moments here are provided by Wilson's continuously sharp—and sometimes pointy-headed—literary pronouncements and descriptions of friends (about whose foibles Wilson is seldom generous). Of "Volodya" Nabokov, he writes: "[his] idea of a literary work of art is something in the nature of a Fabergé Easter egg or other elaborate knickknack." Wilson records a meeting with Auden in which the poet "suddenly began telling us that he was no good at flagellation." Wilson travels (twice) to Europe, noting the superiority of Continental gossip and fondly watching his wife's toes (all he can see of the bed where she's reading) from his own hotel armchair. From the Bible to the Iroquois, from European fiction to the locals in upstate Talcotville, Wilson's wide-ranging interests suggest his continuing intellectual vitality. These journals form a permanent and valuable record of Wilson's interests and tastes during the 1950's; they also offer an amusing if informal social and literary history of that era.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0374520666
Page Count: 714
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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