An extraordinary biography of the late essayist and novelist (1912—89) by a former fiction editor of The New Yorker. Kiernan begins in 1984 as McCarthy accepts a literary prize, then returns to 1910 and chronology. After her parents died in the 1918 flu epidemic, Mary went to live with relatives, attended Catholic schools (experiences she assessed in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, 1957), attended Vassar (where she played the Virgin Mary in a pageant and later set her best-known novel, The Group, 1963), and then set out to conquer a literary world not friendly to women, especially those with her acerbic wit and disarming candor. As a drama critic, she savaged plays that have become masterpieces of the American stage, including A Streetcar Named Desire. She went on, however, to enjoy a distinguished, though controversial, literary career, which featured, near the end, a bitter libel suit by Lillian Hellman. Responding to an “irresistible impulse,” she abruptly ended the first of her four marriages, then married critic Edmund Wilson (a “fat squinty-eyed cartoon character with a skull like a squashed melon,” comments Kiernan). Her final marriage—to diplomat Jim West—lasted her remaining 29 years. Kiernan reveals startling details about McCarthy’s sex life (She reprints Edmund Wilson’s description of his techniques for bringing McCarthy to orgasm, and reveals that both Arthur Koestler and Paul Tillich made unsuccessful passes at her), and discloses how fame and modest fortune engendered McCarthy’s surprising fondness for fashion. Kiernan is not always profound, and is sometimes downright banal in her observations——If you don’t like the way things are going, you can stand and fight or you can pick up and leave”—and in her use of myriad offset quotations from McCarthy and her circle, which suggest a research paper by an undergraduate determined to use all her note cards. All in all, though, the definitive life of McCarthy, comprehensive in scope and scrupulously researched. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-393-03801-7
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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