A swarming and copious selection of letters by the Nobel Prizewinning novelist and playwright. ``My life is a series of blunders and recoveries and so it will be, I expect, till the end.'' Described by his biographer Marr (Patrick White: A Life, 1992) as ``a wise man who could be stubbornly wrong,'' White (191290) acquired the epistolary habit at age four or five, never to abandon it for long. His letters, by turns irascible and fond, cover a broad range of correspondents: from friends of his youth to literary people like Christina Stead and Shirley Hazzard to public figures like Ronald Reagan; White scathingly dismissed the president's Chinese diplomacy, savaged the American taste for ``celluloid, plastic, and decadence,'' and urged Reagan to ``[drop] out from time to time to contemplate problems which seem insoluble. Probably they will remain so.'' White wanted his friends to destroy the letters they received, but it's fortunate that not all complied with his wishes, for the fullness of this inadvertent self-portrait is nearly Shakespearean. The bluntness and sporadic cruelty of White mingles with a bold and outsize warmth that give the letters an epic feel without the usual affectations of the epic. His maverick, embattled nature guided him, and the letters tingle with it as they chronicle his early wanderings, wartime service in the Middle East and Africa, lifelong partnership with onetime Greek soldier Manoly Lascaris, and pattern of friendships won and forsworn. His love-hate relations with Australia were perhaps emblematic of his character, but so was a blitheness that led him to send thanks in 1940 to an American boyfriend: ``That little G-string you presented me with last year is a great help in a New York heat wave!'' Marr offers useful commentary; drawings of the craggy-faced novelist also lend a charm to these pages. A literary milestone.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-226-89503-3
Page Count: 678
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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