An intimate glimpse into Hemingway family dynamics.
A son’s loving memorial to his famous father.
"The man I knew,” writes Ernest Hemingway’s son Patrick (b. 1928), “tried very hard to be a good family man. I think our correspondence shows he was intimately connected with his wives and his children all his life.” Patrick was the writer’s son with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he married in 1927; Gregory (Gigi) was born in 1931; and Patrick’s older half brother, Jack (Bumby), was the son of first wife Hadley Richardson. Edited by Patrick’s nephew Brendan Hemingway and grandson Adams, the letters reveal shared enthusiasms for fishing, hunting, African terrain, and rigorous adventure. As a father, Hemingway was doting, solicitous, and demanding. “I wish to hear from you and Giggy and Bumby on the first and the fifteenth of each month throughout the year,” he ordered Patrick. “The letters are not to be hurried, nor sullen, nor forced; but are to be as good letters as you can write at bi monthly intervals.” Some letters betray tensions that Patrick was eager to alleviate. “When I am acting stupid or disrespectful, please tell me and tell me plainly,” he wrote when he was 23. “I am not as talented or interesting as Mr. Giggy, but I want to be a dutiful son to you.” After his mother died in 1951, Patrick wrote from Key West, where he was attending to estate matters: “If you think I am a worthless person, that I am sitting over here loafing, with designs on your property, tell me so, and I will know clearly what I am and make some effort to do better.” Apparently, he did very well. “You were the only brother I had among my sons,” Ernest wrote. “Mr. Bumby admirable but not really intelligent and Mr. Gigi wonderful but always strange.” Later, he added, “I love you always and am very proud of you.”
An intimate glimpse into Hemingway family dynamics.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982196-86-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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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
An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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