Sensitive to Laughlin’s strengths and shortcomings, MacNiven offers a comprehensive, prodigiously researched biography of a...
The adventuresome life of a literary maverick.
James Laughlin (1914-1997) had a long career as one of the most influential publishers of the 20th century. Given $100,000 in securities on his 21st birthday—with the advice that he “use it to help people”—Laughlin, still a Harvard undergraduate, decided to devote the dividends to publishing, a venture that became the estimable New Directions. In late 1936, the anthology New Directions in Poetry and Prose featured work by Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Cocteau, e.e. cummings, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Laughlin’s mentor, Ezra Pound. Intellectually and aesthetically adventurous, Laughlin introduced or promoted writers who came to define modernism: Borges, Garcia Lorca, Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, among many others. MacNiven (Lawrence Durrell: A Biography, 1998, etc.) has drawn upon nearly 1,200 boxes of personal and professional papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library, along with sources in other archives, for this sympathetic and thorough chronicle of Laughlin’s life and business ventures. Besides publishing, Laughlin was a poet, avid skier and owner of a ski resort. His obsession, though, was “becoming an elevating influence on American culture.” MacNiven offers vivid portraits of the irascible Pound, with whom Laughlin had a filial relationship; Laughlin’s intimate friend Thomas Merton; and poet Kenneth Rexroth, who often “played the devil’s advocate…jabbing ruthlessly wherever he suspected cant, false values, weak art.” Subject to bouts of depression, insomnia and “alternating moods of ego-driven assurance and abysmally low self-esteem,” Laughlin, at 56, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a condition his father also had. MacNiven suggests that his illness contributed to his lifelong search for a woman who would make him feel worthy and loved, resulting in troubled marriages and many infidelities.
Sensitive to Laughlin’s strengths and shortcomings, MacNiven offers a comprehensive, prodigiously researched biography of a transformative literary figure.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0374299392
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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