Was the great poet a traitorous madman or an quixotic visionary? These previously unpublished letters and documents give more evidence for his sanity than for any lack of it. Beginning in 1940, Pound voluntarily broadcast pro-fascist speeches from Italy, aimed at listeners in the US. Americans, he declaimed, had betrayed their own tradition. Not Roosevelt but Mussolini was the inheritor of the American revolutionary legacy: “The heritage of Jefferson...is HERE, NOW in the peninsula at the beginning of the fascist second decennio, not in Massachusetts or Delaware.” Pound expounded crackpot economic views (anti-Semitic conspiracy theories) while dispensing Confucian wisdom. In May 1945, American authorities arrested and indicted the 60-year-old poet for treason. He was found insane and committed to a federal mental institution. The documentation here seems contradictory. Reports of Pound’s behavior at the time suggest that he was sporadically delusional. For example, when arrested, Pound insisted that he was the right man to negotiate peace with Japan on behalf of the US: “Subject became very indignant,” observed his FBI interrogator to J. Edgar Hoover, when the FBI refused to cable his offer to Truman. However, in letters to his wife, Dorothy, Pound comes across here as mundanely sane, even vigorously, impishly self- possessed. He offers her “nooz items” and asks for hers, in return; reports on gifts received (—Eileen have came again with masses of chocolate & a copy of Verlaine—); provides congratulations (—Glad you are payin income tax, indicates existence of income—;and conducts literary conversation in his signature wry lingo (in a cover note to a military censor about poems forwarded to Dorothy, he declared, “The Cantos contain nothing in the nature of a cypher or intended obscurity—). Spoo (English/Univ. of Tulsa) and Omar Pound, the poet’s son, offer copious and needed annotations to the highly allusive, typically playful letters. As ever, Pound remains a spitfire conundrum.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-510793-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
