Adds very little to this far more than twice-told tale. (11 b&w photos)
Another analysis of the Zelda-and-Scott train wreck, this one heavier on feminist psychology, lighter on quotidian detail.
The prolific Wagner-Martin (Sylvia Plath, 1999, etc.) doesn’t offer much that’s new in her narration of one of the saddest stories of the last century; for that, see Sally Cline’s much more richly detailed Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Life in Paradise (2003). The author acknowledges that much of the Fitzgeralds’ story can’t be known because both principals told self-serving versions of their troubles; correspondence is missing, and even the remaining documents (e.g., Scott’s ledger) offer only dubious, unreliable evidence. So Wagner-Martin’s approach is to include commentary—sometimes piquant, relevant, and enlightening, sometimes not—by an assortment of psychologists and psycho-theorists, from Jung to Jean Baker Miller to Marilyn Yalom to Jane Ussher. (An annoyance: sometimes the quotations are unattributed in the text, forcing the curious reader to search the endnotes for the source.) From these folks we are supposed to learn more about how women are affected by pregnancy, how the death of a parent can hurt, why alcoholics drink, what schizophrenia really means. The technique is generally obtrusive and unsuccessful. Wagner-Martin emphasizes Zelda’s early life as a cosseted child and a southern belle (she was the unconventional teen-queen of Montgomery, Alabama) and declares, a tad unfairly, that previous biographers have not recognized the significance of these years. The author also highlights Zelda’s talents as a dancer—better than either her husband or her critics have acknowledged—an artist, and a writer, at one point waxing effusive about the “sonority” and “tonal pattern” of her prose. And Wagner-Martin provides a good account of the double narrative Scott and Zelda provided her doctors in May 1933, a bizarre and heart-wrenching confrontation that runs 114 pages in the typed version of the stenographer’s record. When an angry Scott calls her a third-rate writer and dancer, Zelda replies, “You have told me that before.”
Adds very little to this far more than twice-told tale. (11 b&w photos)Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 1-4039-3403-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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