Triumphant closing of Holroyd's massive life of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1951), begun with The Search for Love (1988) and The Pursuit of Power (1989)—a work 15 years in the writing. (The notes will be published separately.) Now WW I ends and Shaw, in a Chekhovian mood, writes Heartbreak House, his elegy for prewar England, a ``tragic'' play that he slyly complains has been accepted as ``a bedroom farce.'' Shaw girds himself for his greatest labor, the five-play metabiological history and future of mankind fantasy cycle, Back to Methuselah, an unplayably long philosophical treatise (well appraised by Holroyd) that nonetheless is staged first in Manhattan, then in Birmingham (England), much to Shaw's amaze. Then he refashions into English Jitto's Atonement, a play by his German translator, although Shaw's German is far, far worse than his translator's groping, misspelled English—and it's a hit! But the press is down on him for not being serious, so he accepts his wife Charlotte's urgings and decides to rescue the real Jeanne d'Arc from the cheesy image she's fallen into and once more allow her to be a legitimate heretic in his straightforward Saint Joan—for which he is universally praised for not being Shaw—and wins the Nobel Prize. Through all these events (which include helping T.E. Lawrence correct a six-pound manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom), Shaw's letters and public wit glow with no dimming of luster, although the truth is that he's a deeply shy man who likes to be alone. Mentally, his last years are strikingly vigorous despite ``the lure of fantasy'' in his playwriting. Don't miss Shaw's joy during Charlotte's last days as she undergoes remission of neurotic anxieties and drops 40 years from her face. Holroyd keeps a lightly even voice throughout so that every word Shaw utters—and he is clearly the greatest wit in the English language—glistens with intelligence against his fading hopes for humanity. (Thirty-two pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-57554-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
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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