Unauthorized, yes, but worthy of becoming the standard life of Hughes. Illuminating, elegant, and excellent.
Imaginative, comprehensive biography of the writer best known in the United States not for his own work, but for his tragic marriage to the doomed Sylvia Plath.
Ted Hughes (1930-1998), the late, great poet laureate of England, always reckoned that his life was his sole currency. But which life? Bate (English/Oxford Univ.; Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, 2009) ventures that there are two chief parts to Hughes’ “poetic self,” the one that really counts: a Wordsworth-ian impulse for authenticity and a Coleridge-an impulse for exalted vision, battling between symbolism and confession. That argument is somewhat highfalutin, but Bate works it well throughout the pages of this long study, which gets points for being as much thematic as chronological. Notwithstanding, even Bate cannot escape the posthumous arm of Plath, whose unhappy circumstances led the already private Hughes to wall himself off even further, one reason this biography, which opens and closes with legal squabbling, is unauthorized even two decades after Hughes’ passing. In her new book M Train, Patti Smith wonders why Plath is buried so far from home and hearth and Hughes, and Bate’s sensitive narrative offers no end of clues. Of greater interest than Hughes’ love life to students of writing are such matters as the gestation of The Iron Giant and his “thought-foxes,” dreams both splendid and frightening. Bate recounts the critical reception of Hughes’ work as he proceeds, but in the end, the literary judgments, rock-solid, are his: “Some of the poems in The Hawk in the Rain now read like period pieces. There is sometimes a clever literary allusiveness that does not feel real.” That notion of reality is important, for Hughes was a writer of masks as well as birds and stones, and Bate’s explication of his works will be of much use to students of literature.
Unauthorized, yes, but worthy of becoming the standard life of Hughes. Illuminating, elegant, and excellent.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236243-8
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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