Glimpses of a writer's past, given as though discreetly decanted. This memoir by the New York novelist (Solo Faces, 1979, etc.) and short-story writer feels more like a first-person elegy, with all the poignancy available to one who writes in advance of life's closing. A sadness, half-suppressed in the telling, flows through the pages. The tone is most persuasive whenever Salter's story itself takes melancholy turns—when, for instance, he writes of his editor-friend Ben Sonnenberg's decline from multiple sclerosis or when he alludes to his difficulties and failures as a writer. But at times the narrator seems to long to absent himself from the narrative, perhaps to escape the pain inherent in anyone's excavation of his past. At these times, lacking an integral structure, the writing loses momentum. And although the book is packed with characters—from Irwin Shaw to Robert Redford to scads of femmes fatales, portrayed with a courtly tact—it seems too often to depend on scenes and observations saturated with a rather dated literary perfume. The scent bears traces of Hemingway's literary stoicism and Fitzgerald's lyric delicacy. Many of the continental settings and scenes belong to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, too, especially those involving wartime (the West Pointeducated Salter was a pilot) and Paris, where his reveries of wine, women, and belles lettres are generically familiar to a fault. Women are in general a weak point for Salter here, rarely seeming more than seductive ghosts. For instance, he writes condescendingly of Sharon Tate that ``if she was not a very good housekeeper, she was pure of heart and her flesh was a poem. One felt that she could be enjoyed in all the ways that one can enjoy a woman.'' Though almost too patrician to be true, the book includes descriptions and characterizations that demonstrate how good Salter can be when he dispenses with his courtly reserve. A connoisseur's view of himself and others. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-375-50015-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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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