``Places have always been more important to me than people,'' Bowles (b. 1910) confesses in one of more than 400 letters collected here by Miller. Spanning more than seven decades, the letters offer no intimate revelations and little celebrity gossip- -but they're full of dazzling descriptions of faraway places. ``At Asni the trees are full of peacocks that scream murder. The road swarms with children who hand us amethysts till we have nowhere to put them.'' With campy wit, Bowles compares the exotic to the homegrown mundane: In a Saharan oasis, the coarse grass ``looks like the stuff they put in Woolworth's windows on the floor of the display cases at Easter time''; in a Berber village, ``the streets and walls look as if someone had poured tons of white cake- icing over them.'' It's not surprising, then, that Bowles-the- writer's letters add up to a book that one would rather quote than discuss. What is surprising is the strength of Bowles-the- composer's devotion to Berber music and Bowles-the-husband's devotion to his wife through long years of illness. Descended from New England Puritans, Bowles read Poe at age six and took off from there. In the 30's, he was close to Gertrude Stein and Aaron Copland. In the 50's, he befriended Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal. In his pursuit of sexual adventure and his reliance on the drug kif, he was way ahead of the pack—led by Ginsberg and Burroughs—that hit Tangier in the 60's. More recently, Ph.D. candidates have elicited from him pithy statements on writing (on the hermetic absorption needed to complete a novel: ``Don't let the air in; it kills the fetus''). About a quarter of the collection is dead wood—chat about agents, contracts, fees—but read in one sitting, it's a fascinating, tonic history of the counterculture in what was for a time the American century. (Photographs)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-18510-7
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
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