The prolific Mellen (Creative Writing/Film, Temple Univ.) brings a literary talent as well as cinematic eye to the family saga of Kay Boyle (1902-92), an epic life reflecting the great literary and political events of the century. Behind the 30 volumes of fiction and poetry, besides essays, reviews, letters, and the short stories that Boyle brought to perfection in the New Yorker, was a restless, passionate, ambitious, desirable woman, as intense and prolific in her writings as in her loves and political beliefs—beliefs ranging from the anti-Semitism she shared with Ezra Pound in the 30's to the radicalism she shared with Joan Baez and Eldridge Cleaver in the 60's. Drawing on massive primary sources, family interviews, and the thousands of unpublished letters Boyle sold during her lifetime to earn money, Mellen tactfully presents her subject's public life as a successful author (``our little Dostoyevsky in ski pants,'' according to Kazin); her political life as an activist during McCarthyism and then Vietnam; and her private failure as a mother and wife. Incapable of introspection, Boyle retained her glamorous facade into old age, oblivious of her flaws, of the pain she caused those who loved her, or the significance of the causes she opposed (capital punishment, the Vietnam War, feminism) or the ones she sacrificed herself for: student rights, the Black Panthers, nuclear disarmament, migrant workers, Amnesty International. Jolas, Duchamps, Beckett, Djuna Barnes, Joyce, Lawrence are all here. And the scenes are incomparable: Paris in the 20's, Europe on the eve of WW II, America in the 50's, Haight-Ashbury in the 60's, and the campuses of the 70's, where this self-taught writer ended up teaching. Precise in detail, panoramic in scope, psychologically subtle, more than a literary biography, like Boyle herself, it is social and political history, a film waiting to be produced.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-18098-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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