Limns the public man rather than delving too deeply inward.
Breezy, proficient biography of the versatile English novelist, journalist, and critic, by former TLS editor Treglown (Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green, 2001, etc.).
A mostly self-taught writer whose life spanned the 20th century, Pritchett (1900–97) had an enormous influence on his contemporaries, especially with his travel writing from Ireland and Spain and his probing literary criticism. He was born to a working-class family in Ipswich; his charming rogue father, a Christian Scientist, was always evading creditors, and his mother was emotionally fragile. After a stint at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich, Pritchett honed his craft largely by experience, moving from an early job sorting skins at the docks at Bermondsey (Nothing Like Leather) to working in Paris as a glue salesman, then as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, which took him to Ireland (Clare Drummer), Spain (Marching Spain), then Boston. “A small man with big appetites,” he was driven and prolific, constantly writing short stories in between doing journalism in order to support his growing family: his first marriage ended in divorce, while his second to Dorothy Roberts endured happily for the rest of his life, resulting in epistolary exuberance and several children. Gradually, Pritchett came to accept he wasn’t primarily a novelist, and during WWII his essays for the New Statesman and his more than 80 talks for the BBC provided his audience with a literary education. The success of his last novel, Mr. Beluncle (1951), a hilarious and sorrowful take on ordinariness, led to travel to America, writing for publications such as The New Yorker, and later work for PEN. Treglown has conducted innumerable interviews to flesh out his subject; however, Sir Victor’s massive work receives glancing explication, especially the latter biographies of Balzac, Turgenev, and Chekhov.
Limns the public man rather than delving too deeply inward.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50853-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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