As Gloria Steinem might say, this is what 80 looks like: a pale paean to flowers, food, and friends. Sarton's novel As We Are Now (1973)—a brilliant and moving fictional journal of life (and death) in a nursing home—makes this memoir pallid by comparison, and the problems of inconsequential, lackluster writing that appeared in Sarton's earlier journals of infirmity and old age (Endgame, 1992, etc.) crop up here as well. The life cycle of the flowers on the author's Maine estate are documented in detail; lunches, dinners, and flower arrangements provided by friends and ``fans'' are described exquisitely; pain (apparently caused by intestinal blockage), medication, and visits to the holistic doctor who monitors the author's diet are carefully depicted. Sarton's joy in her cat, her many visitors (especially friend Susan, who frequently comes bearing roses but who isn't otherwise identified), and her fan mail is matched by the burden she feels in answering letters, letting in her cat at 1:00 a.m. (and sometimes again at 4:00 a.m.), and checking the weather. But the last handful of entries here reminds us of Sarton the well- regarded novelist and poet. In them, apparently in response to improving health, she switches from dictating into a tape recorder to writing the day's events, and from simple sentences in which ``wonderful'' is the adjective du jour to a richer, more thoughtful prose style. This is her last journal, Sarton says; her next project will be a novella based on a recent trip to England. Sarton's energy and focus are inspiring—but readers looking for analysis or fresh literary gossip won't find them here. (Photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 9, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03529-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
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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