Samway, who edited Signposts in a Strange Land, Percy's posthumously published essays, successfully triangulates the major forces unifying Percy's life (191690): a complex mix of Catholic faith, existential angst, and scientific method. Percy spent his childhood in Greenville, Miss., raised by his uncle, the poet Will Percy, after the suicide of both parents. He began writing early, as a gossip columnist for his high school newspaper, but later turned to medicine, seeking a scientific discipline to bring order to his chaotic life. Stricken with tuberculosis while serving a residency at New York's Bellevue hospital, Percy spent several years recovering in a sanitarium. There he began reading philosophy and identified the central irony in his life: Science, despite unraveling the workings of the human body and the universe, ultimately knows nothing about the mystery of human existence, ``what it is like to be a man living in the world who must die.'' To explore that mystery Percy turned to fiction, which he considered a means of applying the scientific method to the study of the self. Though best known for novels of alienation, including his 1962 National Book Awardwinning The Moviegoer, Percy felt his essays on semiotics (the study of ``why people talk and animals don't,'' as he joked to longtime friend Shelby Foote) were his most important work. Despite considerable efforts to explain them, Percy's difficult language theories here remain obtuse. Samway, a Jesuit and close friend of Percy's, is more adept at illuminating the writer's midlife conversion to Catholicism, insightfully tracing the influence of this sustaining religious faith on his fiction—a connection Percy felt too few readers made. He believed The Moviegoer was misunderstood as ``a novel of despair, rather than a novel about despair but with hope.'' Such crucial distinctions make this an essential critical companion to Percy's work, though the respectful tone mutes Percy's darker side—the malevolent irony and wicked satire so integral to his novels. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18735-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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