Way too much information on the love life, but an essential resource for coming to terms with a key figure in the Auden...
A life of writer/memoirist Isherwood that emulates its subject’s detachment but hardly his conciseness.
Best known for Berlin Stories, the basis for the Broadway play I Am a Camera and for the even more successful musical Cabaret, Isherwood (1904–86) deserves recognition for a wider body of work, argues Parker, a British historian and biographer (The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos, not reviewed). Scion of landed gentry and son of a soldier killed in WWI, Isherwood, in early adulthood, embraced left-wing politics, pacifism, atheism, and homosexuality. In the 1930s, he achieved fame as arguably England’s most promising novelist and as collaborator with ex-schoolmate and sometime lover W.H. Auden on the plays The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6. His life later included a controversial move to America, with Auden, in 1939; a surprising conversion to Hinduism and brief commitment as a monk in the 1940s; thirty years as a Hollywood screenwriter; and lionization as “favorite uncle” to the post-Stonewall generation of gay authors that included Armistead Maupin and Edmund White. Access to Isherwood’s longtime companion Don Bechardy and friend Stephen Spender, as well as to the novelist’s astonishing collection of diaries and letters, enables Parker to pull back the curtain on a writer who on the surface was utterly candid. Charming, witty, and generous, Isherwood could also be narcissistic, bossy, drunken, and, most shockingly, anti-Semitic. Parker points to memoirs, further, that not only altered details but also faked or censored diary entries. Unfortunately, although he has bravely plunged into the forest of Isherwood documentation, Parker sometimes loses his way through sheer inclusiveness, citing his subject’s every quarrel and patch-up with his widowed mother, troubled brother, and lovers (an estimated 400 by age 44).
Way too much information on the love life, but an essential resource for coming to terms with a key figure in the Auden circle. (16-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6249-7
Page Count: 1024
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
