An intriguing, occasionally overly detailed portrait of the life and times of the Trillings and the liberal circles of which...
The life and times of Diana Trilling (1905-1996), the wife and collaborator of celebrated literary critic Lionel Trilling and an important opinion-shaper in her own right.
The Trillings were at the center of the New York intellectual scene from the turbulent 1930s until Diana’s death in 1996. Robins (Copeland’s Cure: Homeopathy and the War Between Conventional and Alternative Medicine, 2005, etc.) contends that while Lionel, a Columbia University professor and popular short story writer, “was admired as one of America’s most influential and original literary critics,” Diana’s role in their joint output is all-too-frequently overlooked. Diana’s own literary contributions as an editor and writer were impressive, and she published six books, including the bestseller Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor (1981). As Robins also notes, her reviews and essays were “published in dozens of prominent magazines,” including the Partisan Review, Harper’s, Vogue, and the Nation. Lionel died in 1975, but Diana didn’t release her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, until 1993. However, she chose not to reveal the truth of how much effort she had put into her husband’s work, including the formulation of his text as well as editing and rewriting. As Robins writes, “Lionel’s work was her work throughout his life. There simply was no time for her own.” The prominence of the Trillings as noncommunist intellectuals was underscored by an invitation to a dinner at the Kennedy White House. Making use of Diana’s extensive archives, which had been mostly forgotten, Robins does a solid job of rehabilitating a significant literary and cultural figure of the 20th century, a woman who spent much of her career in her husband’s shadow.
An intriguing, occasionally overly detailed portrait of the life and times of the Trillings and the liberal circles of which they were a part.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-18208-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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