Conscientious chronologies, bibliographies, and checklists of detective-hero trivia round out a survey as cozy as any of its...
Everything you ever wanted to know about the lives of the leading women of mystery—though precious little about the books they wrote.
Eschewing “academic footnotes [and] feminist folderol” from the outset, DuBose, who owns a marketing and research firm, produces substantial, readable, derivative summaries of the memoirs and published letters and interviews of Anna Katharine Green, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and Margery Allingham—and briefer overviews of such recent luminaries as Patricia Highsmith, P.D. James, and Ruth Rendell. The subjects she champions emerge as surprisingly alike in their independence, their early sense of their writing vocation, and their frequent use of mystery fiction to support deeper interests like Rinehart’s family and Marsh’s theatricals. But DuBose’s decision to turn her back on the higher criticism carries a heavy price: there’s very little criticism of any sort here, except of the authors’ husbands (who with a few notable exceptions come across as a sorry lot). DuBose devotes a good deal of attention to what made her heroines write, much less to what made them write the particular books they did, so that each of their careers, except for the variables of autobiographical elements and popular success, sounds remarkably homogeneous. The longest chapters plod indiscriminatingly through biographical territory diehard fans will already know; the capsule summaries of Mary Higgins Clark and Anne Perry are little more than extended blurbs. DuBose is weakest on James and Rendell, writers whose work cries out for more thoughtful analysis, and strongest on Tey and Allingham, offering passing comments (“In the gentlest possible manner . . . Miss Pym Disposes is an angry book”) that shed more light on their novels than reams of biography.
Conscientious chronologies, bibliographies, and checklists of detective-hero trivia round out a survey as cozy as any of its subjects.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20942-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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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