Illuminating, but as the author himself suggests, it’s the beginning of the discussion about Murdoch’s life, not the end....
A long but selective biography that focuses on the distinguished British novelist as an expert on love, emphasizing her many affairs and intense friendships.
Briskly summarizing Murdoch’s Anglo-Irish ancestry and birth in Dublin in 1919, Conradi devotes the longest portion to the period from his subject’s years as an Oxford undergraduate through jobs as a civil servant in wartime London and as a UN refugee worker in postwar Europe, to her teaching post at Cambridge in 1947 and ’48. During those years, richly detailed through her letters and journals, Murdoch joins the Communist party and excels in her philosophy studies. She works hard, yet everything seems almost effortless to her, including maintaining close ties with her many friends. These early connections are frequently the models for her novels’ characters, though she denies the portraits are directly drawn from life. Conradi deftly weaves throughout the text an account of Murdoch’s political activism, including her complicated views on Ireland. The author loses steam a bit in the second half, when he introduces her future husband, literary critic John Bayley, whom she met around the time she was writing her first novel, Under the Net (1954). Conradi discusses Murdoch’s fiction best in terms of the relationships that influence it. And he leaves out a lot. After her school days, there is scant mention of her family, though she was close to both her parents. There is only one description of the strain her enduring marriage to Bayley might have suffered because of her extramarital attachments, lesbian and otherwise. Her illness and death from Alzheimer’s in 1999 are briefly, though movingly, touched upon. Given the fact that the author is Murdoch’s literary executor (and the book is dedicated to Bayley), it’s not too surprising that no one has a bad word for her, with the exception of one former lover, novelist Elias Canetti. It’s also true that, as Murdoch herself admitted, very few people really know her. Conradi could well be one of them.
Illuminating, but as the author himself suggests, it’s the beginning of the discussion about Murdoch’s life, not the end. (50 photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04875-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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