Readers of Wouk will delight in accompanying him through his triumphs and grief.
Gently meandering work about writing and remembrance by a beloved American sage and author.
A kind of tongue-in-cheek anti-autobiography, this slender memoir by Wouk (The Lawgiver, 2012, etc.) divides his writing life and influences since he was 12 years old in 1927 (“the year ‘Lucky’ Lindbergh flew over the ocean nonstop to Paris”) between “Sailor,” or how his itinerant real life insinuated itself in his work, and “Fiddler,” the spiritual journey of his later years, as he plunged into Judaism and the saga of Israel. His longtime wife and literary agent (since deceased) used to read everything that he wrote and pounced on his idea of writing his autobiography by reminding him skeptically, “you’re not that interesting a person.” Wouk’s roots as a comedy writer pop up throughout the book. Having grown up in a Bronx Jewish household to Yiddish-speaking parents—his steam-laundry boss Papa regaled the family Friday nights with his readings of Shalom Aleichem—Wouk was steeped early on in folk humor and resolved to be a gagman, hired by “gag czar” David Freedman and then Fred Allen. By 1943, he was scrawling the first page of his first novel, Aurora Dawn (1947), aboard a minesweeper and became a rather accidental novelist, or so he writes about his advance for The Caine Mutiny (1951)—he was “bemused by this windfall of bucks.” Indeed, the author can barely grasp the effort that certainly charged his monumental works of fiction, starting with “the first novel about American Jewry,” Marjorie Morningstar, which put him on the cover of Time. Wouk was first moved to write about the Holocaust by reading Raul Hilberg; from there, he plunged into the “main task,” aka the World War II books. His “Fiddler” years led him to the autobiographical Inside, Outside (1985) and to years of intensive military research for The Hope (1993) and The Glory (1994)—“it’s expected of you,” he was told.
Readers of Wouk will delight in accompanying him through his triumphs and grief.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2854-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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