New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb, in consultation with the Cheever family, here adds to the six excerpts from Cheever's journals that originally ran in the magazine. Drawn from 29 loose- leaf notebooks, spanning 35 or so years, this selection represents a mere fraction (1/20 in Gottlieb's estimate) of Cheever's random writings. Fortunately, readers of these remarkable journals are spared the prose interludes (by Cheever's son, Ben) that so marred the selection from his letters a few years ago. This is Cheever as unadorned and self-revealing as we'll getand it's not just more confessions of alcoholism and bisexuality. As Ben suggests in his introduction, these journals serve in lieu of an autobiographythey document the inner life of an artist in a way few works ever have. Cheever proves himself a man of profound tensions: at once drowning in loneliness and warmed by his love for his family, craven in his sexual desire and elevated by genuine piety. These contradictions run through his aesthetic concerns as well: While he has decided to insinuate himself "like a spy" into middle-class suburbia, he fears having taken his "disguise too seriously." He delights in the mundane, and the journals glimmer with quotidian insight and observationthe beauty of nature, the joys of Westchester life. But these affirmations, many of them religious, must break through the despair, which is pervasive. Cheever agonizes over his familial past, his mother dying, his brother's alcoholism. He frets for his marriage, threatened by his constant lust. And he worries over his work, from the nuts and bolts of writing to its afterlife. In Rome, he escapes "the alcoholic life of a minor literary celebrity." In Ossining, he recognizes the progressive nature of his disease. Recovery comes, but so does the cancer that took his life in 1982, with the last entry here written days before his death. More so than his letters, these journals remind us that Cheever has earned his place among the modern masters.
Pub Date: Oct. 9, 1991
ISBN: 0307387259
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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