Veteran biographer Hayman (Tennessee Williams, 1994, etc.) painstakingly traces the great German novelist's progress from anatomist of fin-de-siäcle decadence to august personification of his nation's conscience. While maintaining a veneer of bourgeois propriety, Mann (18751955) experienced a lifelong, seemingly unconsummated passion for young men about which he wrote freely in diaries kept sealed until several decades after his death. Hayman makes efficient use of these journals to convincingly reinterpret much of Mann's life and work in light of his sexual secret, arguing that Death in Venice, for example (in which an aging writer becomes obsessed with a boy), is fundamentally autobiographical. The biographer's focus, however, is not on Mann's inner life, which he leaves nearly as opaque as he finds it, but rather on his accomplishments as a public figure. Hayman locates the origins of Mann's formal style in the starched severities of the wealthy merchant family into which he was born. Once Mann escaped to become a writer, successes came quickly: first well-regarded stories, then the massive family saga Buddenbrooks, whose runaway popularity vaulted him at a young age into the highest circles of literary celebrity. The author skillfully chronicles the progress of Mann's masterful narratives from genesis to publication and also lays out his political evolution, revealing both his early anti-Semitism and the courage with which he later actively opposed Hitler. Mann's life with his wife and children and his late years in exile in the US are meticulously rendered, and ultimately the drama of his bisexuality seems little more than a footnote to history. But Mann's compartmentalized consciousness cries out for a more trenchant examination; striving nobly not to speculate, Hayman refuses to make the educated guesses biographers can best supply. An important, accomplished work, containing the outlines of a less professional, more passionate look at Mann and his family that, while yet unwritten, might someday provide drama to match the master's. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-19319-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 2025 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.
