A tidy though somewhat tedious history of the literary rivalry and oft-fractured friendship between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Donaldson, biographer of Fitzgerald (1983) and John Cheever (1988), begins with a laborious introduction to his subjects” childhoods and early romances that limply attempts to draw striking parallels between the two men based upon such unexceptional experiences as problems with parents and love affairs ending disastrously. After this lamentable opening, however, Donaldson’s pacing and analysis improve markedly as he delineates the origins of the men’s friendship amidst the snappy decadence of the American expatriate community in 1920s Paris. With their world populated by the likes of Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and the cream of the Parisian social scene, Hemingway and Fitzgerald moved, frolicked, and fought in the limelight both of their private social circles and a scrutinizing public eye. Tempers frequently flashed over their criticisms of each other’s works: Hemingway’s attack on Tender Is the Night and Fitzgerald’s suggested revisions for A Farewell to Arms are but two examples of their aggressive posturing, which stretched into long literary skirmishes. The many fracases the two men found themselves in, including Hemingway’s pummeling of critic Max Eastman and Fitzgerald’s alcohol-induced misadventures, provided the men with ample opportunities either to realign themselves as friends in mutual support or to distance themselves from each other. Even more, though, than their respective writings and celebrated social blunders, the friendship floundered over the question of reputation; as Fitzgerald succinctly stated, “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.” Freed from Donaldson’s armchair psychoanalysis of his subjects, Hemingway Vs. Fitzgerald would emerge a cleaner and tighter history of the men, whose heady lives and harrowing words could well be left to tell their own story without such an intrusive authorial presence. (18 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1999
ISBN: 0-87951-711-5
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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