Escaping the lure of hagiography, McCourt’s clear vision allows both the specialist and the general reader to learn from his...
In this leisurely and engrossing study of the connections between geography and genius, McCourt (Literature/Univ. of Trieste) traces the influence of Trieste upon James Joyce’s imagination and literature.
When the Zurich Berlitz School failed to hire Joyce in 1904, he and his (common-law) wife Nora Barnacle traveled to Trieste and remained there far beyond their initial plans. McCourt investigates Joyce’s time in the city, from his arrest with drunken sailors on his first day to his final departure for Zurich in 1920. With a majority population of Italians and a minority population of Austrians and Slavs, Trieste teemed with polyglot personality (and sometimes tension) in the years prior to WWI. Examining the details of Joyce’s life in this bustling port, McCourt describes the ways in which the city influenced the creation of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake. McCourt is a well-trained and gifted reader of Joyce, and the marriage of his nuanced textual interpretations to his historical knowledge of Trieste results in a sharp, lively, and erudite reconsideration of Joyce and the effects of his years in Trieste. Artistic and political movements, including continental socialism and futurism, wafted through the city streets, challenging Joyce’s perceptions of himself and his writing. In addition to the scholarly acumen McCourt brings to this biography, he portrays the intimate details and human foibles of Joyce with kindly and humorous sketches. Ups and downs with Nora, the children, and brother Stanislaus, trips to Dublin, Pola, and Rome, and hassles with his publishers allow the reader to meet Joyce at his best and his worst, and thus to get a rounder vision of the man.
Escaping the lure of hagiography, McCourt’s clear vision allows both the specialist and the general reader to learn from his insights in an engaging and inviting fashion.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-299-16980-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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