A perceptive, readable work of Laurentiana, though perhaps too late in its own right.
Well-crafted life of the once-famous (or infamous) writer who got much mileage out of shocking the bourgeoisie.
“How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life,” David Herbert Lawrence grumbled, late in his short life. “How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price-list.” Lawrence was the uncommon product of all-too-common stock, the child of an impoverished coal miner whose wife was certain that she had married beneath her station and instilled in Lawrence a recognition of the war between the sexes. He took that war all too literally, it seems; some of the more unpleasant moments of literary scholar Worthen’s careful biography concern Lawrence’s habit of hitting his partner in scandal, Frieda, and otherwise demeaning her (“ ‘Pull in your belly, you big bitch,’ an acquaintance was shocked to hear him say,” and that wasn’t the worst of it). Such moments do nothing to brighten Lawrence’s reputation when few people now read him anyway; “his reputation has fallen in the literary and academic worlds which, in the middle of the twentieth century, treated him as a great writer,” Worthen laments, adding that Lawrence is regularly suspected of being racist, sexist and fascist—but neglecting the possibility that modern readers might just find him musty, revolutionary though some of his work was in its time. For all the unpleasantness and, perhaps, minor status of his subject, however, Worthen does a fine job of reconstructing events in a timeline punctuated by the Lawrences’ roaming from one work-conducive backwater to another—Lake Como, Guadalajara, Santa Fe—only to have the rest of the world discover them in their wake, making such places unaffordable until Lawrence, near death, finally brought in enough income from the sale of his books to go where he wished, too late.
A perceptive, readable work of Laurentiana, though perhaps too late in its own right.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-341-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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