Altogether engaging if decidedly selective reminiscence from the peripatetic writer (not "author," he stresses) who's one of the world's most successful storytellers. Eschewing traditional autobiography, Michener (who turns 85 next year) looks back on his long, globe-trotting life from more than a dozen vantage points—travel, people, politics, health, wealth, etc. This idiosyncratic format permits him to comment at length on topics of his choosing and to avoid subjects he finds painful or none of a reader's business. Beyond a brief allusion, for example, there's no mention of two matrimonial failures, and little about his enduring marriage to a nisei named Mariko. He does, however, offer intriguing glimpses of his impoverished boyhood in a foster home and the steely resolve that won him scholarships and honors at Swarthmore and graduate schools. Meanwhile, Michener spins a wealth of marvelous yams about his years as a teacher, editor (at Macmillan), WW II naval officer, omnivorous reader, itinerant lecturer, occasional show-biz advisor, and, more recently, member of government commissions. Among many other recitals, his rueful accounts of how the Post Office chooses the subjects of its postage stamps and of the travails of an unreconstructed liberal running for elective office in Bucks County, Pa.—a bastion of rock-ribbed Republicanism—stand out. The author also recalls highs and lows of a writing career that (to the dismay of many critics) saw him win a Pulitzer Prize for his first book (Tales from the South Pacific, 1947) and make frequent appearances on bestseller lists for decades thereafter. While not one to underrate his craft or accomplishments, Michener refuses to employ royalty statements to dispute the typically damning judgments of the literary establishment. Indeed, he seems content to let the reading public have the final word on his work. The guess here is that fans and foes alike will find the discontinuous, digressive, and quite delightful narrative at hand as much to their separate tastes as ever.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0812978137
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
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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