Artful ramblings about life fully lived and well remembered.
Lyrical and darkly funny meditations on death, infirmity and other disasters of aging by one of Britain’s most acclaimed playwrights.
Gray, author of scripts for radio, television and the stage, begins his seemingly stream-of-consciousness diaries on his 65th birthday, the day he learns that his good friend Harold Pinter has cancer. So does his close friend Ian Hamilton, who dies during the course of Gray’s diary keeping; and before the end, Gray learns that he has it, too, though his stomach and liver are “in such a shambles” that he won’t live long enough for his prostate cancer to matter. Indeed, death hovers over the book yet doesn’t permeate it, for Gray has filled it with sharp observations, delicious and terrible childhood memories of parents, grandparents and schooldays, and choice comments about films (Gary Cooper’s portrayal of the tortured, stoic sheriff in High Noon, he writes, owes much to the actor’s painfully inflamed piles during the filming) and the work of other writers (W.H. Auden is especially scorned). Asides, afterthoughts and digressions create the impression that the writing is spontaneous and unedited, the author talking to himself and jotting down his thoughts in a yellow pad. It’s not, however, a casual diary. It’s a collection of well-crafted essays (with intriguing titles—“On Being a Genius,” “Still Not Mummy’s Football Boots,” “A Smoking Urologist”) that touch on friendship, adultery, illness, loss, writing, family and anybody and anything else in life that captures the writer’s attention. Throughout, he is frank and funny about his failings and his weaknesses (“his fecklessness, self-indulgence, extravagance”). Once a four-bottles-of-champagne-a-day drinker who now has only diet sodas, a smoker who’s trying to cut down from his habitual 60 cigarettes a day, he’s overdrawn at his bank and can’t pay his taxes, yet he dines out more often than in, and vacations with his wife in Barbados and Italy.
Artful ramblings about life fully lived and well remembered.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1545-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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
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