As with his equally masterful biography of Malcolm Lowry (Pursued by Furies, 1995), Bowker here does signal service in reviving a once great literary reputation. Durrell (191290) may only occupy the second tier of 20th- century British writers, but he's at the very top of it. Like Lowry, he was personally unpleasant, abusive, misogynistic, blithely lecherous, cantankerous, an inveterate drunk. Writing tended to goad him into a state bordering on madness, drawing those around him into the fecund maelstrom, often with unpleasant results. He wrote quickly, anxiously; many of his greatest books were produced in a matter of months. Though a proponent of Freudian analysis, he stayed far away from the analyst's couch, afraid the talking cure would dissipate his creativity. While Durrell had an ostensibly large artistic range—poems, travelogues, thrillers, even paintings—most of his work returned to a few large themes, in Bowker's words: ``the quest for wholeness through sex and art and, faced with the disintegrating ego and a world gone mad, the confrontation of death and the coming to terms with it.'' Until modern mores caught up with him, his focus on sex was considered quite scandalous, and he was often lumped together as a pornographer with his close friend Henry Miller. Yet behind all the bad behavior and outrageousness, Durrell worked a good deal of his life as a respected member of the British diplomatic corps, with postings to Cyprus and Yugoslavia. Bowker is a shrewd judge of character and has substantial storytelling flair. He effortlessly weaves biography and criticism together into a discerning whole. The only major flaw in this unauthorized biography is beyond his control: The ``fair use'' doctrine drastically limits his ability to quote from Durrell's work. A noteworthy success that meets the highest standard of literary biography. (16 pages illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-17225-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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