A work invaluable for what it says, frustrating for what it does not.
The first English translation of the desultory, digressive recollections—originally published in 1933—of the youngest brother of the celebrated playwright, novelist and short-story writer.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904, grew up in a family that struggled to survive and lived apart for a time while the father looked for work in Moscow after departing the countryside, where his family had risen from serfdom. Eventually, the artistic, intellectual family reassembled, and the boys, though struggling financially, found ways to pay for their educations. Anton became a physician, a profession he never completely surrendered, and then the writer whose stories and plays continue to delight and illuminate. The text here is nothing like a contemporary memoir. There is very little about anyone’s inner life—even Anton’s marriage occurs offstage in several swift sentences—and the author, though he proceeds chronologically, pauses often to append asides on a variety of subjects, including visitors to their house or his own struggles and successes as a writer. He sometimes gets dates and places wrong—the translator makes corrections in the endnotes—and avoids analysis of Anton’s work. He does tell the story of an actual shooting of a seagull that may have been the genesis of that eponymous play, and talks about how Anton met with Tolstoy—but nothing about what occurred. Still, there are memorable images that give us a taste of what a frisky, playful prankster Anton was before TB struck him down. He once went fishing with a friend in formal tails and top hat; he startled another sleeping friend with a flashlight in the face; he kept a pet mongoose that alarmed visitors.
A work invaluable for what it says, frustrating for what it does not.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-61883-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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