A top journalist's engaging, worldly-wise account of a 35-year career in what, on the evidence of his wryly anecdotal text, comes off as the news game. All told, Corry spent 31 years with The New York Times (where, in the 1950's, he started as a copyboy in the sports department). Now a fellow at Columbia's Gannett Center for Media Studies, he forsook his otherwise lifelong employer in 1969 for Harper's, returning in 1971 to the Times after Willie Morris had been ousted as editor of that magazine. During his tenure at both publications, Corry formed strong and independent opinions on Manhattan's viscerally liberal literary establishment, as well as on its governance and cafe society. Never forgetting that the access he enjoyed almost anywhere in the world was more institutional than personal, the author covered a wealth of stories at home and abroad—stories ranging from Castro's Cuba through the suicide of Phillip Graham (then head of The Washington Post); political prisoners erroneously believed to be held by a Greek junta; Jackie O.; and Jerzy Kosinski (whose vilification by The Village Voice Corry rebutted in a lengthy Times article). Moreover, as a longtime proprietor of the Times's ``About New York'' column, the author offered readers perceptive takes on the city's haut monde and lesser lights. But he didn't write (as he does here with rueful wit) of his crumbling marriage, financial woes, love affairs, and problems with alcohol. Nor did he pass the sort of public judgment he passes here on famed colleagues and contemporaries—David Halberstam, John Lindsay, Norman Mailer, William Paley, Harrison Salisbury (who ``never met a revolution he didn't like''), William Styron, et al.—though, during a stint as the paper's TV critic, he had a lot to say about the media's handling of news. An absorbing memoir of a journalist's life during the best and worst of times.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13886-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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