By now, any Hemingway biography is built as much upon the scaffolding of its predecessors as upon the writer's life itself. Hemingway's own story, in fact, must be more familiar generally than the stories of his works. A differentiating idea or two is necessary—and Mellow (Invented Lives, 1984, etc.) has them. Portraying Hemingway neither as the man of action nor as the complete boor that other biographies have (and that sometimes have seen themselves pitted in competition with Papa), Mellow's Hemingway is a man superbly equipped for literature by having the greatest understanding of style; and a man haunted by what human ambiguities aesthetic style suggests—Mellow finds Hemingway's relationships with men, his homophobia, his failed marriages, as hardly accidental. Along this double fork, Mellow proves himself one of the more respectfully keen analysts of why Hemingway was so good a writer in his earliest works: There is fine lit-crit here in addition to all the dates and facts (``At his best, Hemingway is a poet of convergences, providing moments of sudden reality, of some deflected vision—an epiphany, perhaps—not altogether recognized or understood, that is nevertheless transfixed in narrative''). Mellow understands writing enough to know that its demands can make any person both more and less than he is; his book lacks a moralistic rancor that others, faced with Hemingway's bad character, have not been able to forfeit. But this is perhaps also because he finds so convincing the suspicion that Hemingway's manliness was the most desperate of his fictions: There is, in the way Mellow places his biography's structural emphases, a certain lenient pity for a man who might have done and been better had he come out of the closet. It's a tactful, unpushy thesis but unmistakable, and makes Mellow's book different from its fellows. (Two eight-page photo inserts—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-37777-3
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
