All different kinds of people are going to be disappointed by these heavily heralded diaries—kept by England's most acerbic schoolboy, playboy, traveler, soldier, and novelist. Scandal-seekers, aroused by news of London brouhahas, will find: some disapproving prep-school comments on boy-boy liaisons (Waugh destroyed the presumably homosexual Oxford diary); in the partying Twenties, page after page of "little lesbian tarts and joyboys," unfamiliar footnoted names, flat decadence ("Olivia as usual behaved like a whore and was embraced on a bed by various people"), and an astonishing, tiresome amount of drinking; and, the one true poison plum, Randolph Churchill on a mission to enemy-occupied Yugoslavia—coughing, farting, always drunk, apparently deserving of Waugh's nowfamous line (after 1964 surgery): "it was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it." So much for scandal. Students of the English literary scene won't do much better, since Wangh rarely discusses the books he read and reviewed, and his meetings with the Famous resulted in only the briefest notation: Noel Coward—"no brains"; the Sitwells—"Sachie liked talking about sex. Osbert very shy. Edith wholly ignorant." And admirers of the novels will certainly find Waugh's raw, raw materials here (a Welsh prep school, the Bright Young People, arduous travels in Africa and South America, WW II sorties), but hardly any references to the writer's craft appear. As for the man himself—the conversion to Catholicism happens between diaries as do the shattering breakup of his first marriage and his nervous collapse. Only in the last "boiled eggs and narcotics" years, along with scorn for his children, increasing boredom, and fears for society ("How long will Liberty, Diversity, Privacy survive anywhere?"), does the super-critical voice explore inward. Anti-Semitic, racist, labeling those unfortunate enough to cross his path as "odious," "hideous," and "stupid," Waugh put his worst self and much dull detail into these remarkably shallow, though terribly stylish, jottings. Scholars may want to go digging, but those who treasure Tony Last, Guy Crouchback, et al., are advised to steer clear.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1977
ISBN: 0753827387
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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
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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