A spirited, scholarly portrait of a man who wrestled with merciless demons and emerged victorious. (17 b&w photos)
A comprehensive and compassionate biography of novelist-screenwriter Fante (1909–83), whose once-forgotten fiction and
largely forgettable screenplays are enjoying a renaissance. With apostolic fervor, Cooper (English/Calif. State Univ.) presents convincing evidence that Fante's work should be ranked "among the finest achievements of twentieth century American writing." Beginning his tale with the 50-ish Fante in Rome working on a screenplay, Cooper soon dives back into the murky river of Fante's past and begins to clarify. The son of an immigrant stone worker, he was born in Colorado, attended Catholic schools (graduating from high school "without distinction"), tried college a few times (unsuccessfully), and eventually headed to California. While working at a variety of menial jobs, Fante, in one of those miracles of self-creation, decided to turn to literature—and in no time at all he was a friend and correspondent of H.L. Mencken, a contributor to the American Mercury, and a novelist published by Knopf. Cooper meticulously chronicles Fante's yo-yo career: his stunning successes (stories were published in prestigious literary magazines; novels like Ask the Dust and Full of Life earned warm reviews) and his miserable failures (he drank heavily, gambled ineffectually, neglected his family for golf, and wasted years writing mindless movies). Most affecting are Fante's final years of suffering: the loss of eyesight and legs to diabetes, the recurrent sojourns in madness—all at a time when his literary reputation was ascending. (During this period he dictated to his wife one final, well-received novel, Dreams from Bunker Hill.) Cooper has Fante's own eye for arresting prose—he describes Fante buying a house so infested with termites that his pregnant wife would one day "plunge through the rotten floorboards"—and his richly informative endnotes are compelling reading as well.
A spirited, scholarly portrait of a man who wrestled with merciless demons and emerged victorious. (17 b&w photos)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-86547-554-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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