With access to Cowley himself (1898-1989) and to his huge archives, Bak (American Literature/Catholic University of Nijmegen, Netherlands) has produced a detailed yet cluttered history of his subject's literary endeavors from 1915 to 1930—of his ``apprenticeship'' as poet, literary journalist, editor, and critic. Bak takes the same ``spectatorial attitude'' as Cowley took toward his culture. He observes the young man of letters from his boyhood in a pious Swedenborgian family in Pittsburgh to his years at ``godless'' Harvard—covering the professors Cowley studied with, the courses he took, his favorite authors, his friends. Bak reports on Cowley's service in 1917 in the Ambulance Corps in France, his return to Greenwich Village, and his marriage to an untidy bohemian whose infidelities infected them both with syphilis. The author recounts his subject's return to France in the 20's; his joining the expatriates he named the ``lost generation''; and the artistic experimentalism that became modernism as well as those who created it: Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats and Joyce. While doing freelance writing (including, from 1924-28, articles in Charm, a magazine published by Bamberger's department store for its female charge customers), Cowley, Bak relates, emancipated himself from the seclusive art of the symbolists and evolved into a socially responsible writer and a political radical, eventually succeeding Edmund Wilson as book-review editor of The New Republic (an evolution Cowley described in Exile's Return, 1934). An epilogue covers this ``return'' and establishes Cowley's literary stature. Bak names all the little magazines Cowley wrote for or cared about but misses the excitement, the ferment, that produced them. A rhetorical and lifeless biography, then, that reduces Cowley to the sum of his literary opinions. (Thirty-two illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8203-1323-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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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