More spontaneous, garrulous, and revealing than her published poetry or prose, these letters, over 500 selected from the several thousand she wrote between 1928 and 1979, edited by her friend and, from 1957, her publisher, Robert Giroux, are as close to an autobiography as the private and modest Bishop (1911-79) was to write. Clearly a poet's letters, they are primarily addressed to Robert Lowell, her friend, mentor, and briefly suitor, and to Marianne Moore, again a mentor from her student days at Vassar, but one whom she gradually outgrew. These are formal letters, in keeping with the writer's restrained and understated personality, devoted to poetry, poets, getting published, getting grants, awards, money, and whatever interested her. A book called Mathematics and the Imagination provokes her ``attempt at mastering infinity. I get it for two minutes and then it slides away.'' Such subtle humor and delicate perception appear in her observations of plants, animals, flowers, people, daily life in New York, Maine, Yaddo, Key West—where she lived for nine years with Louise Crane- -and Brazil, where she spent 15 years, from 1952 to 1967, with her beloved Lota, an heiress who built her a studio and committed suicide when Bishop returned to America. Of interest but not included by Giroux are Bishop's pride in Lota's political life, the logistical problems it created, the poet's plaintive response to Little Women (``matrimony, womanhood, babyhood are best''), and adventures, such as her trip down the Amazon with Aldous Huxley. Giroux's Bishop is reticent about her feelings, refined, incidentally homosexual, sickly, judgmental about her friends, and disdainful of ``this Creative Writing business,'' the teaching career, mostly at Harvard, that she undertook late in life. A useful tool in the Bishop industry that in 1993 alone produced the Collected Poems, Collected Prose, and at least nine biographical critical studies. The value here would be enhanced by explanatory footnotes.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-22640-7
Page Count: 725
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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