A fitting tribute to a unique, significant writer and man.
His wound may have been geography, but his legacy was generosity. That’s the takeaway from this new collection of essays honoring the late Pat Conroy (1945-2016).
Novelist Seitz (The Cage-Maker, 2017, etc.) and Haupt, the executive director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center, pull together a who’s-who of writers from the Lowcountry and beyond for an ode to the real Prince of Tides. Remarkably, what could have been a tedious eulogy turns out to be a compelling read that illuminates the man behind the myth, a writer’s writer, a fantastic storyteller, a flawed genius, and an exceptionally loyal friend. Of course, some essays excel more than others. Sallie Ann Robinson, a student of Conroy’s on Daufuskie Island, which he later made famous in The Water Is Wide (1972), writes a moving account of what it was like to be taught by the larger-than-life author: “Pat saw that our experiences had been limited, and he wanted us to have more.” Other chapters are more nostalgic, but even still the collection feels genuine. How many writers get a 60-author-strong memorial published after their death? For fans of Conroy, the peek into his real life is especially entertaining. Apparently, he was notorious for leaving the same message on all of his friends’ phones—“It’s up to me to keep this dying friendship alive”—although it was next to impossible to call him back as his own voicemail was nearly always full. But even if you couldn’t get him on the phone, Conroy always showed up when it was important, like when another author needed a book jacket endorsement. A self-declared “blurb slut,” he was renowned for not just giving other writers recommendations, but also writing thoughtful praise that many credit for their success to this day. Among others, notable contributors include Jonathan Galassi, Ron Rash, Marjory Wentworth, Patti Callahan Henry, Rick Bragg, and Mary Alice Monroe.
A fitting tribute to a unique, significant writer and man.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8203-5448-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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