Written with profound admiration and affection, but the author should have hit Delete more frequently. (38 b&w and color...
A fond chronicle of the nearly 40-year friendship between poet Padgett (Great Balls of Fire, not reviewed) and artist Brainard, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1994.
Although the two met in first grade in Tulsa, it was not until high school that they began to fashion the friendship that is the foundation of this uneven volume. Padgett has employed a patchwork structure that would have pleased Brainard, perhaps best known for his collages. The movement is ever forward, ever chronological, but the many individual sections range in size from a single short paragraph to a dozen or so pages. Interspersed are numerous candid photographs and reproductions of Brainard’s immensely interesting work. Padgett’s intent, generally well realized, is that the pieces will combine to reveal his friend’s many facets. After high school, both Padgett and Brainard headed to New York City, the former to attend Columbia, the latter to make it as an artist. They remained close, and Padgett is able to effectively particularize their relationship by quoting from the myriad letters the two exchanged. We see Brainard’s rise in the art world: at the height of his career he created a cover for the Paris Review, designed sets for the Joffrey Ballet, staged well-reviewed shows, published a variety of books, and schmoozed with celebrities. We see the emergence of his gay identity, his addiction to speed, his depressions and disappointments, his wish to look like James Dean, his vast reading (Barbara Pym was a favorite), his devotion to friends and lovers. Not all the quotidian detail Padgett remembers is interesting or instructive or necessary, and he sometimes fails to supply fundamental information—e.g., he says their friend Frank O’Hara died of injuries but neglects to reveal it was an accident involving a dune buggy. Padgett concludes that Brainard was a secular saint.
Written with profound admiration and affection, but the author should have hit Delete more frequently. (38 b&w and color photos and illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56689-160-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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