A fine essay by Susan Spanier and a cleareyed post-mortem on Hemingway written by John Steinbeck in 1961 are highlights of a...
A worshipful homage to Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961).
Only the most ardent apostles of Hemingway, his era, and his oeuvre will find total satisfaction in this book. Katakis (A Thousand Shards of Glass: There Is Another America, 2014, etc.), steward of Hemingway's literary estate, and his guest essayists make much of the journalistic immediacy and chronologies of Hemingway's letters, just one element of Hemingway memorabilia housed at the John F. Kennedy Library. Unfortunately, the early examples are banal, and many of the later letters are uninspiring. Some readers may feel voyeuristic reading painfully personal letters from Hemingway to his family, various wives, and romantic infatuations and peevish or apologetic missives to fellow writers. One would think that correspondence between Hemingway and the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Maxwell Perkins might bristle with vitality, but these letters are largely unremarkable, and they are assembled in an oddly disjointed, out-of-sequence manner. The same is true of many of the photos, with the young Hemingway depicted on the same page as the man years older. While often evocative and revealing, the photos as a whole seem to have been selected with insufficient regard for illustrative value, like a family album or slapdash celebrity picture book. Katakis dismisses the “myth of Hemingway, some of which he created himself,” as “too simplistic,” yet he succumbs to it at points throughout the text. The narrative contains little sense of continuity apart from the editor's attempt at connective tissue: setting the important years of Hemingway's life in the context of other political and literary milestones. Otherwise, until coalescing in the final third, the book caroms about in time and place.
A fine essay by Susan Spanier and a cleareyed post-mortem on Hemingway written by John Steinbeck in 1961 are highlights of a book that should have managed more resonance.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4208-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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