A biographical sketch of Wolff—founder of Pantheon Books—by his wife Helen, brief essays and anecdotes he produced for German radio in the early 1960's, and a smattering of correspondence—all ably edited by Ermarth (History/Dartmouth). Starting as a young publisher in Weimar Germany, Wolff (1887- 1963) sought out the fresh voices and daring literary talents of that era, and this collection reflects his steady support of and extensive contact with authors such as Kafka, Franz Werfel, Karl Kraus, and Heinrich Mann, and poets of the caliber of Rilke and Georg Trakl. Many of the writers published by the Kurt Wolff Verlag became known as Expressionists, but for Wolff their talent mattered more than the label, and these essays and letters make clear that he went out of his way to nurture their work. The economic and political situation in Germany put an end to his venture in 1930 and he emigrated with the coming of Hitler, but unlike many who failed to make the transition Wolff came to New York in the early 1940's and founded Pantheon Books, a legacy in American publishing that was to rival his accomplishments of 20 years before. While this small sampling provides a glimpse at best of his activity across five decades as a publisher, still the details of correspondence and reminiscence gathered here indicate the magnificent scope of his contribution to modern literature. Tantalizing in its view of Wolff and his world, especially the pre-Weimar period—and a sad commentary on how little publishers today heed his excellent example.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-226-90551-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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