This unsparingly forthright second memoir should ruffle some feathers that badly need ruffling.
Sequel to the prolific fantasy writer’s previous autobiography, Bio of an Ogre (not reviewed).
After the usual biographical details (a summary of the previous book; a childhood spent in England and Spain, and on to America, where he developed from a child considered subnormal into a superior college student), Anthony emphasizes the determination and persistence necessary to break into print (a workaholic, he considers “writer’s block” merely an excuse for not getting on with the job). With his straightforward, honest approach, Anthony has earned a certain notoriety in the publishing world: he never backs down when threatened by bullies, nor backs off when the facts are on his side (and, since he checks very carefully, mostly they are). He’s dedicated to his readers and spends two days a week answering fan mail. From this correspondence—the fans often pour their hearts out to him—he estimates that one in three or four girls suffer some form of sexual abuse: an appalling statistic, representative or not. Puzzled and resigned, he details the truly disgraceful behavior of most publishers—the current one not excepted—ranging from malevolent incompetence through outright fraud. His fellow SF/fantasy writers evince similarly complex conduct: Isaac Asimov (courageous, but in person a compulsive grabber of female breasts and buttocks); Keith Laumer (a snake in the grass, even before the stroke that tipped him over the edge); Gordon R. Dickson (a drunk who never fulfilled his potential); the irascible Harlan Ellison (a personality clash if ever there was one); the talented, tragic John Brunner. Editors get the treatment, too, from the meddlesome Lester Del Rey to the witty host of the famous Milford Writers’ Conferences, Damon Knight, who allows personal remarks as the basis for critical judgments.
This unsparingly forthright second memoir should ruffle some feathers that badly need ruffling.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87464-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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