Navel-gazing, then, but redeemed by the author’s rich power of memory and mellifluous voice: the telling’s the thing, not...
Veteran biographer Holroyd (Bernard Shaw, 1998, etc.) digs up some more material on his most recent subject: his own family.
In the author’s previous memoir, Basil Street Blues (2000), he applied his trademark high-toned literary approach to personal history. That book brought Holroyd unexpected popular acclaim, as well as a fair amount of communication from readers who offered up more information about some of the foggier regions of his family history. These chips and fragments gave the writer an opportunity to add detail to the broad picture he painted in his earlier work. Holroyd takes a necessarily scattershot approach to his material; after all, something as rough and unplanned as a human life, much less numerous lives bound together by bloodlines and circumstance, can’t be neatly organized. But it’s remarkable how much he learned from complete strangers about relatives as close as his father and as mysterious as his grandfather’s mistress. Almost more interesting, however, are the details that Holroyd lets lie along the road of his discoveries, such as his penchant for visiting prostitutes as a young man and his secret marriage to novelist Margaret Drabble. Holroyd occasionally overidentifies with his subjects, a common problem with biographers and an especially deadly one for a writer who seems already too fond of introspection and who is essentially researching himself. Still, there are times—especially when revisiting his long, loving, tumultuous relationship with writer Philippa Pullar—when the power of his narrative takes off on a raw tear that is nothing less than exhilarating.
Navel-gazing, then, but redeemed by the author’s rich power of memory and mellifluous voice: the telling’s the thing, not the story.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05273-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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