As the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Tory MP, cofounder of the British publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson, writer and editor, the author can't fail to pen an amusing though occasionally flat-footed memoir. As in Portrait of a Marriage (1973), Nicolson is best as Proustian observer, recounting with calm acquiescence the misadventures of his mother, the libertine, the influence of his father, the patrician man-of-the-world, and the antics of their Bloomsbury friends: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, et al. Though his tone is blithe and his sense of time past more a laundry list than a cohesive web, Nicolson's insights are sometimes startlingly profound, as when he says of Virginia Woolf's death: ``The reason why she killed herself was not that she feared madness or found the stress of war unendurable but that she thought she had lost the gift of writing, and what was the purpose of life if she could not describe it?'' His accounts of school days at Eton and Oxford are banal, as are reports of his stint with the Grenadier Guards in the African and Italian campaigns during WW II. His early fascinations with Mussolini and Hitler, and his failed attempt to snipe a German guard solely for the purpose of impressing a female war correspondent, are the only memorable facets of this period, and their sheer mindlessness makes Nicolson seem churlish. His subsequent account of his years as an MP and ``the single most important moment'' in his life, as an honorable abstainer in Parliament's vote for military intervention in the Suez crisis of 1956, redeems him as a conscientious statesman. More a compiler than a writer, the octogenarian Nicolson does manage, nonetheless, to sketch an insider's 20th-century Britain—a quiet treat for hopeless Anglophiles. (31 b&w photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: March 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14363-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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
SEEN & HEARD
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