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THE DIARIES OF KENNETH TYNAN

A candid and revealing snapshot of mid–20th-century cultural life, seen through eccentric but shrewdly perceptive eyes.

The British critic’s personal jottings from the 1970s chronicle a glamorous life with characteristic wit, underpinned by melancholy.

It wasn’t an entirely happy decade for Tynan, who found it increasingly difficult to write as his emphysema worsened. (Diagnosed in the late ’60s, the disease finally killed the cigarette-smoking 53-year-old in 1980.) The entries begin in the closing years of his tenure as literary manager of Britain’s National Theatre, where he was frequently frustrated by executive director Laurence Olivier’s timidity regarding the politically and sexually provocative plays Tynan championed. Nasty comments about Olivier, on whose acting Tynan had lavished praise as a critic in the ’50s and ’60s, reveal a decidedly catty side to his personality, as do the vitriolic remarks concerning director Peter Hall, who bumpily assumed the reins at the National in 1973. After he left the National, Tynan drifted, trying to get financing for an erotic film and to stage a follow-up to his scandalously successful stage review, Oh! Calcutta! His own sex life revolved around spankings and whippings described in juicy and surprisingly cheerful detail—leave it to Tynan to make S&M sound like a day at the beach. Since the hairbrush got applied mostly to girlfriend Alison, relations with wife Kathleen were understandably strained in this period. Tynan’s habit of attending glittering upper-crust parties and favoring the guests with his adamantly socialist opinions can’t have enhanced his popularity either: “I enjoy testing people,” he admits in one entry. He enjoys hobnobbing with them too: name after famous name, from Marlene Dietrich to Mel Brooks, appears after the words “dinner with” or “drinks with.” The mood darkens in the late ’70s, as Tynan is plagued by money worries and health problems, but his prose still sparkles, his opinions still strike sparks. We sorely miss a critic who writes sentences like: “It is a dangerous fallacy to assume that being a perfectionist is the same thing as having good taste.”

A candid and revealing snapshot of mid–20th-century cultural life, seen through eccentric but shrewdly perceptive eyes.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-58234-160-5

Page Count: 420

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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