Occasionally engaging, but too often lost among the stars.
Journalist and novelist Mewshaw (Shelter from the Storm, Mar. 2003, etc.) recalls his days as a fledgling in the tree of literature and examines the myriad influences of big birds named Garrett, Styron, Jones, Bowles, and Vidal.
There are some dazzling moments in this uneven memoir: James Jones’s catty comment about Hemingway’s oral sex with his shotgun is worth the cover price all by itself; and the long final chapter about Gore Vidal, with asides featuring Pat Conroy and Norman Mailer, coruscates with its subject’s wit. (Vidal once quipped, claims Mewshaw, that the three saddest words in the English language are “Joyce Carol Oates.”) The author can gore literary bulls, too. Accompanied by a tall model in an Italian restaurant, for example, Mailer “looked like a tiny tot in a Halloween costume.” But Mewshaw is drawn to celebrities like a fly to cream pie. He begins by describing how he convinced George Garrett to let him into a writing seminar at the University of Virginia, then segues into accounts of drinking with William Styron, dining with Harold Robbins and Robert Penn Warren and Anthony Burgess and Paul Bowles and Graham Greene (not at the same time). He chatted with Sharon Stone, saw Lindsay Wagner naked, and had a surreal shopping spree with Estelle Parsons in the desert. Mewshaw shows the sense to be self-deprecating at times; he publishes a strong letter from Graham Greene complaining about his published profile of the English writer, and he occasionally admits to various personal and professional failures. But he also seems more than determined to portray himself as an unjustly overlooked novelist, quoting—sometimes at length—flattering comments from Styron, Warren, and Burgess. Errors and careless prose undercut his claims. He attributes to Chairman Mao a quotation from Lao Tzu, misspells Edgar Allan Poe’s middle name several times, and too frequently finds language that is conventional rather than novel.
Occasionally engaging, but too often lost among the stars.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8071-2852-X
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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