This autobiography of Mlle. de Beauvoir up to the age of twenty-one is every bit as fascinating as a de Beauvoir novel, largely because she is as absorbed in herself here as a novelist is in his hero and in the same way. From her birth in 1908, through her childhood in a fairly well-to-do middle class family, through her adolescent insecurity, her loss of faith, the beginning of the drive for independence from her family, her decision to become a writer and a philosopher, her years at the Sorbonne, her discovery of the Cult of Restlessness with its consequences for her of loneliness, pride and dedication, to her final year of study, bringing her a sense of direction and purpose,— all is told with a drive and a feeling of personality that is most compelling. There are, in addition, good portraits of several members of her family, of her closest friend Zaza Mabille, of her cousin Jacques with whom she was in love, and of various fellow students at the Sorbonne including Jean-Paul Sartre. Though she passed through many stages that every sensitive and intelligent girl growing up experiences, most of it seems new because of her vitality and her intellectual curiosity. Her novelist's hand is most clearly seen in her self-editing— in spite of writing about herself in great detail, no incidents or people are presented for their own sakes alone but always as a means of furthering the book as a whole. It is a stimulating story of the birth of an existentialist and the coming of age of an extraordinary young woman. Highly recommended.
Pub Date: June 18, 1959
ISBN: 0060825197
Page Count: 386
Publisher: World
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1959
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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