A comprehensive but scattershot biography of one of the most spirited writers of the 20th century.
A new biography takes an in-depth look at one of English literature’s most peripatetic figures.
Anyone interested in learning about the most violent conflicts of the previous century would get a good start by reading the works of Graham Greene (1904-1991). Born in Berkhamsted, England, he would become one of the literary world’s bravest adventurers, with travels to such hotspots as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Vietnam, Cuba, and Haiti. The clashes he witnessed enliven such novels as The Power and the Glory, Our Man in Havana, Monsignor Quixote, and many more. Richard Greene (no relation), a professor of English and editor of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, uses recently discovered papers and letters (some were found in a “hollow book”) to offer “an account of his engagement with the political, literary, intellectual, and religious currents of his time.” While many of those papers are revelatory, readers are likely to be frustrated by the author’s habit of seguing from one topic to another without fully developing each one. For example, in 1960, “accidental defector” Guy Burgess asked to meet with Graham in Moscow. But the author gives only cursory details of the meeting before moving on to an account of Graham returning to London with a bout of pneumonia and then moving to France as a tax exile. When the author fleshes out events of his subject’s life, the narrative is more compelling. The book is at its strongest in passages that document Graham’s eventful travels, such as his trip to Indochina for research on The Quiet American, the atrocities he witnessed in Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier and used as the basis for The Comedians, and the many chapters on his travels to Panama and his friendship with military leader Omar Torrijos during the country’s struggles for sovereignty.
A comprehensive but scattershot biography of one of the most spirited writers of the 20th century.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-08432-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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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