While brilliant enough on what it reveals, this tripartite memoir by a great man of letters nevertheless reserves much of his life from illumination. Kermode grew up between the world wars in Douglas, the chief port on the Isle of Man. Describing his Manx childhood, he expertly conveys the mixture of magic, mystery, and terror proper to literary recollections of one's youth. Memories of faking a report card, of enduring sadistic bullies, even of solemnly inquiring of God whether oranges taste the same to everyone might seem essentially commonplace. Yet Kermode's trenchant style transfigures such experiences, while his vivid depiction of straitlaced yet vibrant Manx culture as it slowly emerged from the Victorian era enhances his memoir's drama. Strong passages frame the enigma of his mother's vague rural origins and the niceties of class distinctions at the dockside warehouse where his father toiled. The next segment of the memoir treats Kermode's service in the British navy during WW II. Here he offers sterling anecdotes that convey the pathos, horror, and absurdities of the times. That the final third of the memoir, covering his 50-odd-year career as a scholar and literary journalist, should include only a few words about his two marriages disappoints. Kermode acknowledges this ellipsis, professing himself a failure as a family man. Such self-deprecation and reserve also characterize his account of his professional life, which Kermode narrates as a series of failures, most prominent among them his tenure at the CIA-supported literary magazine Encounter and a professorship at Cambridge University, both of which ended with him resigning in protest. More might have been said about his successful books and about his experiences teaching in the US. But what Kermode does share remains of great interest: However truncated, the story of his later years will intrigue literary intellectuals, while his lambent memoirs of youth should attract a broad audience.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-18103-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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
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