Continuing in the brisk, anecdotal style of The Blindfold Horse (1988), which told of her enchanted Persian childhood, Guppy reviews her years in 1950's Paris. Although the setting and many of Guppy's characters may be familiar to Western readers, the leading lady herself is distinctive, sharing early impressions and the start of enduring friendships with a subtle effervescence. All things seem possible as the young student, away from home for the first time, settles into a cramped room, tries alcohol, masters French, and mixes with an international array of brilliant students, artists, philosophers—people of promise. In less gifted hands, this scene would be hackneyed; but Guppy (now a Paris Review editor) invests it with a spark, an astute vision, and ensures a cordial reception. She hears Casals and the shy Segovia (playing as if the guitar ``were part of his very body''); meets Ilya Ehrenburg, Calder, and Camus; is inspired by The Second Sex even as Sartre and Beauvoir nearly pass by her window; and enters into the inevitable first relationship (one Pierre) before taking his measure. Throughout, Guppy recalls her Saint-Germain experience as a kind of intellectual tourism and deftly returns to the sources of particular formative ideas—a book, a music teacher, a neighbor- -with impressive ease. At the close, with her customary good luck, Guppy meets her future husband on a last stopover before returning home. If we're lucky, her next book will be about her London years. (Photographs.)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-434-30852-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Heinemann
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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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