A powerful, revealing and authoritative depiction of one the 20th century’s most notorious literary figures.
Monumentally engaging account of W. Somerset Maugham’s fiercely protected personal life (1874–1965).
On the surface, Maugham’s life was fulfilling and successful. His many plays, novels and stories earned him great fame and wealth, and his marriage to the socialite Syrie Wellcome provided him with a posh London home complete with lavish dinner parties with fashionable guests. Additionally, his handsome income allowed him the freedom to travel the world, including French Polynesia and the Far East, providing him with some of the most robust literary inspiration of his career. Maugham’s emotional well-being, however, faced constant strife. From the death of his parents during childhood, Maugham was insecure and shy and suffered a debilitating stammer. He was also secretly homosexual. Literary biographer Hastings (Rosamond Lehmann, 2002, etc.), who had extensive access to Maugham’s surviving letters and interviews with his only child, spares no detail in describing these other facets of the famous writer’s existence. She writes with great perception about Syrie’s duplicity and selfishness, the sham marriage providing Maugham with both the image of respectability (which “had always been of the utmost importance to him”) but also much misery. It was his tumultuous relationship with the vivacious Gerald Haxton, with whom he shared his life for almost 30 years, that was Maugham’s true passion—maintaining a pretense with Syrie was a tiresome, and expensive, chore. Haxton accompanied Maugham on his far-flung adventures, times that would remain some of the most cherished of his life. Hastings also recounts Maugham’s two stints with British Intelligence, where he thrilled at secreting information and disseminating propaganda, episodes that would inspire Maugham’s much-admired Ashenden stories. All of the drama, intrigue, heartbreak and joy that marked Maugham’s life is reconstructed by the author in enthralling, novelistic prose.
A powerful, revealing and authoritative depiction of one the 20th century’s most notorious literary figures.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6141-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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