The son of Ross Lockridge, Jr., who committed suicide at 33 following the publication of his inventive, 1066-page novel Raintree County (1948), cuts his father a new suit and redresses an injured great American writer. Few readers know much more about Ross Lockridge, Jr., than was depicted in John Leggett's dual biography (Ross and Tom, 1974) of Lockridge and Thomas Heggan, the author of Mister Roberts (1977), a book about two literary suicides who seemingly could not face vast success. Leggett's Lockridge, a motormouth egomaniac, we now see was under-researched and as far off as a funhouse mirror. Larry Lockridge here faces the double task of writing a biography of his father and of finding out what drove him to a ruthless act of self- destruction. In doing this, he has produced what amounts to a major work on depression: a superb analytic description of clinical depression as it was understood vaguely in 1948 and more fully today. At the same time, he describes a great American tragedy, the story of a midwestern hero of great gifts who inherits the spirit of Whitman but comes to grief against a stone wall of materialism built by Houghton Mifflin, MGM, and the Book of the Month Club, to shrink the hero's great work down to salability. The hero's tragic flaw is ``competitiveness.'' Known as ``A-plus Lockridge'' because of his unrivaled scholarly achievements, a master of many languages, a writer possessed of photographic memory who could type 100 words a minute, an athlete who married the most beautiful and intelligent woman he'd ever met, Lockridge set out to surpass Joyce, Wolfe, Melville, and Hemingway only to pull his country's commercial monoliths down on his head, with MGM then erecting a terrible movie as his marker. An immensely moving book, deserving of the Pulitzer Prize that went to James Gould Cozzens's dreary Guard of Honor in 1948.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85440-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
