A well-written look at Fleming’s life, though the book is even better as an indictment of the anachronistic colonialism of...
Parker (The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies, 2011, etc.) considers Ian Fleming’s escape to Jamaica, where he created James Bond and did his best to avoid the high-society life that followed him there.
Fleming was not fond of many non-Brits, but he especially disliked Americans. About the only American Bond character who isn’t a villain is Felix Leiter, a detective Bond cooperates with and often saves. Fleming discovered Jamaica’s wonders in 1943 and quickly bought property with a private beach where he could write, using Jamaica in three of his novels. The house he built, Goldeneye, was spare and featured minimal modern conveniences. However, nature was at her best, and Fleming was happiest during the two months each year he spent in the Caribbean. It was Fleming's paradise; he loved the tropical blooms and the fascinating sea life. At the time, Jamaica was still ruled by a governor, and the racist attitudes of visitors reflected the attitude of empire. Eventually, Noël Coward became a neighbor and lifelong friend as the Jamaican tourist boom took off. Coward brought the jet-set crowd to discover the joys of island life, and anyone who was anyone showed up. Fleming, however, was asocial, heartily disliked the procession of guests and hated his wife’s parties. He isolated himself to write, forbidding guests to even walk by his window. The author parallels Fleming’s life with postwar events that planted the seed for the Bond character. He summarizes each of the Bond books as they reflect Cold War history—e.g., the Suez Crisis, the independence movements and increasing economic turmoil.
A well-written look at Fleming’s life, though the book is even better as an indictment of the anachronistic colonialism of the 1950s and the end of the British Empire.Pub Date: March 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-686-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
PROFILES
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
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