Less a literary convocation than an A-list gab-fest, this volume is filled over the brim with three things Capote cared deeply about: gossip, name-dropping, and himself. An oral biography (on the lines of Plimpton's Edie) may seem superfluous for someone as relentlessly self-publicizing as Capote. Over the course of this conversational parade of witnesses to his sensational career, however, the familiar figures of the elfin young author of Other Voices, Other Rooms and the aged, substance-abusing author of the socialite-scourging Answered Prayers are shattered, or at least chipped away at, by the sheer variety of impressions, anecdotes, and reminisences about an inarguably remarkable, mercurial individual. Despite the recycled high points—arm-wrestling Bogie during Beat the Devil, going head-to-head with Norman Mailer on television, etc.—a multifarious, almost Proustian characterization emerges. Naturally there are the characteristic detractions of Gore Vidal and Mailer (``A ballsy little guy. But . . . those balls got swollen''), the slightly apologetic approbations of Carol Marcus and Joanne Carson, and innumerable opinions in between, from the likes of John Knowles, William F. Buckley, Kurt Vonnegut, the detectives from In Cold Blood, his betrayed jet set, and Plimpton himself. Plimpton has adroitly edited this mass of eyewitness accounts, conflicting testimony, and hearsay into a fairly complete narrative with a seductive aura. Only occasionally does he gloss over extended unpleasantness, such as the depths of Capote's destructive affair with John O'Shea, a married suburban banker; but he also gives space to smaller voices, including the strangely fond account by O'Shea's daughter Kerry (rechristened Kate Harrington by Capote for her teenage modeling career) of the avuncular Pygmalion figure in her life. Capote's flamboyant, fascinating life as related by other voices, other views. (60 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 8, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-23249-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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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