The man who has been called ``the Devil's Lexicographer'' must be a tough nut to crack, for this biography gives us little more than his shell to chew on. Quickly disposing of Bierce's youth (unfortunate, since murdered parents do crop up in his stories), the text moves on to the formative years spent fighting on the Union side during the Civil War. Here Morris, a historian of that war (Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan, 1992, etc.), seems at least as interested in discussing war campaigns for their own sake as for their impact on Bierce. After brief stints as a US Treasury agent and as a night watchman at the US Mint, Bierce turned to journalism. Marriage to Mary Ellen Day, who barely emerges as more than a name in this account, did little to sweeten the character of this equal-opportunity insulter, with targets ranging from the money-grabbing ``railrogues'' who dominated California to politicians, ministers, fellow writers, and dim- witted voters. Morris adequately provides the context for the journalistic writing he discusses; however, in exploring Bierce's stories, including his most famous, ``An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,'' he gives the sense that he has not moved beyond the critics he cites to develop his own sense of the works. Likewise, he seems to have missed something crucial about the man himself. This is a person who, getting red in the face, insisted that he ``was not great . . . was a failure, a mere hack''; who said, just before he vanished into Mexico in 1913, that he had ``never amounted to much'' since the Civil War; and who, as this book's own subtitle acknowledges, defined the word alone as meaning ``in bad company.'' Nevertheless, Morris maintains that Bierce ``did not lack for self-esteem.'' Morris should rejoice in the thought that Bierce himself is unavailable for comment.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-59646-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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