convincing than the complaints of many an outraged former subscriber.
Novelist and ex-staffer Adler (Politics, 1988, etc.) offers an accusatory dirge for the William Shawn New Yorker that is
actually three volumes in one—to its ultimate cost. Adler’s first volume is a brisk analysis of the magazine’s decline under S.I. Newhouse’s ownership. The new regime—whose ascent had been unwittingly prepared for by beloved longtime editor Shawn’s unwillingness to anoint a successor—mounted an expensive chase for new subscribers at the cost of alienating the old, ran color ads that interrupted the magazine’s formerly sacrosanct columns of printed copy, and accelerated the New Yorker’s uneasy embrace of the New Left politics personified by Jonathan Schell. Adler keeps interrupting her indictment, however, for digressive accounts of her own friends and adventures at the magazine. While many of these recollections—of Donald Barthelme, Shawn’s son Wallace, Adler’s arrest in a subway sweep while she was on her way to cover the Ariel Sharon libel trial—are vivid and memorable, none adds authority to her diagnosis of the magazine’s ills. Instead, personal history and philippic meet up in her third volume to create a piquant anthology of invective bound to satisfy everyone but its targets. Thus, in Adler’s view, the rival New Yorker memoirs of Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta are self-serving and embroidered; Pauline Kael’s movie reviews are “inaccurate, sneering, mean”; Newhouse publisher Steven Florio is “young, blustering, cheerful, coarse, incompetent”; Newhouse editor Robert Gottlieb is “almost comedically incurious”; and Watergate Judge John Sirica (who might have thought himself safe from harm in a New Yorker memoir) is “corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest.” The resulting hybrid offers many pleasures, but none of them makes Adler’s heartfelt insider’s diatribe against Newhouse, recent editors Gottlieb and Tina Brown, and the long-standing weaknesses that left the magazine vulnerable to them any more
convincing than the complaints of many an outraged former subscriber.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-80816-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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