A rich, urbane, insightful collection.
Masterful essays from an award-winning fiction writer.
Assessing the novels of Barbara Pym, Hazzard (The Great Fire, 2003, etc.) writes, “her candid, penetrating humanity can be disconcerting, like a quiet, strong, perceiving presence in a busy room.” Much the same can be said of Hazzard’s exquisitely crafted essays, which radiate with shrewd wisdom and intelligence. Of the pieces collected here, only three, lectures she delivered in Princeton’s Gauss Seminar series, have not been previously published in periodicals or as contributions to books. Editor Olubas (English/Univ. of New South Wales; Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist, 2012, etc.) notes that Hazzard sees nonfiction as “something of a distraction…from her primary labor.” But the same qualities acclaimed in her fiction are evident here: acute attention to language and a passionate commitment to fostering “the private bond, the immortal intimacy” between reader and writer. Among many fine pieces are an elegy to her mentor William Maxwell, who first published her stories in the New Yorker and became a cherished friend; her praise of Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick White for work that celebrates “the bloom of a bound humanity”; and five uncompromising critiques of the United Nations, where Hazzard worked in the 1950s. Characterizing the U.N. as a useless body of frightened men, she calls for reforming the “corrupt political basis” endemic in the organization, singling out former Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim for his disastrous record on human rights. One autobiographical essay stands out for its gentle, telling revelations of the author at 16—naïve and craving adventure—living with her parents in Hong Kong, where her need for “an occupation” was fulfilled by a mundane job in a government office. Sent on an assignment to Canton, she recalls the alien “contours of Eastern lands, those landscapes that have never heard of Romanticism or Impressionism.”
A rich, urbane, insightful collection.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17326-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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