Bright, lively, idiosyncratic, and penetrating observations of the personal and political that span a century....
They don't write letters like this any more: churning with energy, witty, engaging, defensive, provocative, informed, and opinionated - always opinionated.
From as many as 10,000 letters that Rebecca West wrote in her lifetime, editor Scott (English/Univ. of Delaware) has delved into archives at Yale, Tulsa, and elsewhere to select around 200 that represent West's personal and professional life and her broad political interests. The letters are arranged chronologically in six sections, each preceded by an introduction summarizing West's interests and concerns at that particular point in time. The first letter, written to a newspaper when West was 15 years old, concerns women's suffrage. The last, written to friends in 1982 (when she was 90), comments on overdevelopment in Provence, the Irish troubles, and Margaret Thatcher. In between is a spill of reportage, commentary, complaint, and critique - ranging from her first meeting with H.G. Wells ("one of the most interesting men I have ever met") to prescient observations from her first trip to Yugoslavia (later incorporated into Black Lamb and Gray Falcon) to controversial comments on communists in the US government and on South Africa under apartheid. Liberals sometimes questioned West's commitment to the causes, and she, in turn, questioned their commitment to facts. Throughout the letters are painful accounts of her deteriorating relationship with her son; attacks upon reviewers who misrepresented her books or her history; and sharp snapshots of celebrities (Wallis Simpson: "common and trivial"; Norman Mailer: "that stupid lout"). Her correspondents included George Bernard Shaw, Harold Ross, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Dorothy Thompson, and John Gunther, as well as numerous other writers, relatives, agents, and publishers to whom she confided her personal and financial woes. A useful chronology and brief biographies of the most frequent correspondents are included, but the collection suffers from the necessities of editing and becomes something of a hodgepodge in the end.
Bright, lively, idiosyncratic, and penetrating observations of the personal and political that span a century. (Illustrations, family tree not seen.)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-07904-4
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
