So, is some Settle better than none? A resounding yes.
When she died in 2005, novelist and memoirist Settle (Spanish Recognitions: The Roads to the Present, 2004, etc.) was still working on this affecting memoir of her experiences before, during and after World War II.
Is some Settle better than none? Editor Freeman certainly thinks so, and much of this justifies her judgment. Although Freeman says the text lacks only the “final touches,” it is missing much more—not just sections the author certainly would have expanded or added but also stylistic consistency. Still, there is much to admire and make us wish for more. Settle begins in the pivotal summer of 1938, when, in love with Shakespeare and animated by her experiences at Virginia’s Barter Theatre, the 19-year-old decided to eschew her undergraduate career at Sweet Briar and flee to New York to seek her fortune. She had some successes (she rode an elevator with Harpo Marx, got to read for Scarlett O’Hara), some failures (she was certain William Castle was going to use her in a film; he didn’t). She tried modeling, and then, not long after Hitler invaded Poland, married a young Englishman and delivered his child; they separated during the war. Gradually, Settle began to realize that she was a writer. It’s not a profession you choose, she notes: “You are conscripted.” She tried poems and journalism and propaganda, working in England for the Office of War Information, before she transformed herself into a novelist with the ferocious determination and tenacity to endure the myriad rejections she received before The Love Eaters was accepted in 1953. Settle likes to talk about the literary celebrities she knew. There are good set pieces here about a nice lunch with Eliot and a nasty encounter with Maugham.
So, is some Settle better than none? A resounding yes.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-05732-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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