A study that belabors the obvious and provides little illumination.
Delbanco (English/Univ. of Michigan) must have intended this as a bookend to his earlier study, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (2011). Through a selection process that seems arbitrary, he focuses on (in chronological order) author Stephen Crane, painter Dora Carrington and composer George Gershwin.
“I wanted figures close to our own historical moment yet sufficiently removed so perspective can be gained,” writes the author. “[T]hey are of our time and place, though not precisely in it, and we have the advantage of hindsight when assessing their careers.” Plenty of others could have made the cut, but these three in particular are distinguished more by their differences than what they have in common: two Americans, one Brit; one suicide, one dead as the result of ill health, one blindsided by a tumor; one extremely well known: “As a songwriter, composer, performer, Gershwin has few if any equals in this nation’s history,” one very little known: “the most neglected serious painter of her time” though one who “accomplished so little and is so little known,” one who is mainly known for one novel, though he preferred his poems and was a masterful writer of short stories. Each has a chapter, which is mainly a biographical sketch with some criticism of their work interwoven, and each inspires the sort of what-if conjecture, that can never be answered or supported, concerning the artistic progression of such artists if they had lived through a second act. As Delbanco writes of Gershwin, “It’s hard to guess what would have happened had he progressed to middle or old age….Maturation takes time.” He later suggests that “the art of youth” is “best summarized by a single word: ‘energy.’ ” A coda covers the author’s own experience, with a first novel that earned prominence that later fiction didn’t sustain.
A study that belabors the obvious and provides little illumination.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-11446-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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