A charming, informative, and timely memoir, with vividly somber undertones, sure to be treasured by James’ readers.
From British mystery writer (and recent Baroness) James, an elegantly constructed, deceptively off-the-cuff reflection on her life and times that is by turns humorous, nostalgic, instructive, and ominous.
In her tart fashion, James (A Certain Justice, 1997, etc.) initially notes that, rather than wait for interlopers to begin dissecting her life in unauthorized studies, it would be better (and more fun) to address the subject herself. In August 1997 she began a yearly diary in which her succinct daily entries arced inevitably backwards, using the medium to bring up long-neglected experiences in her own transformation from civil servant and young mother to acclaimed, best-selling author. In turn, she uses her personal journey to consider the tumultuous social changes that took place in Britain and British society (for whose popular culture and contemporary licentiousness she reserves harsh judgment). Although this approach sounds conceptually scattershot, there are a great many passages in this book of concentrated, unsettling power. These range from frightening yet acidly clear-eyed recollections of the war years to insightful considerations of the writing process and the mystery genre. As her journal coincides with the publication of A Certain Justice, she also portrays in restrained but humorous fashion the day-to-day chores of a top-flight popular writer “on the road”; at 78, James clearly relishes her contact with fans and her place in Brit-literary society, depicting her many speaking engagements at a variety of intellectual and social affairs. James is very adept in integrating consideration of her own past (including tales of her long-lost husband and of her own youth) into what is essentially a recounting of the present, both as response to the modern era and as a personal record not preoccupied with her “golden years.” Yet, as the title implies, an urgency pervades James’ setting down this selective kaleidoscope of memory, which makes her transitions seem smoother and her themes more universal (particularly her invaluable asides regarding her chosen genre).
A charming, informative, and timely memoir, with vividly somber undertones, sure to be treasured by James’ readers.Pub Date: April 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-41066-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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