A fine job: May’s attentions may well inspire new interest in Grey’s largely forgotten work.
A well-crafted biography of the western writer.
Grey (1872–1939) made his considerable fortune on sturdy tales of the Wild West, tales with an uncomplicated vision of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Continuing the study he began with Zane Grey (1997), literary scholar May reveals that Grey’s own life was considerably more tangled. From the Mormons (whom he portrayed as villains in Riders of the Purple Sage), he acquired a hankering to take up polygamy—a notion that his ever-tolerant wife Dolly finally quashed. From tales of boyhood heroes, like Daniel Boone, he nurtured a profound wanderlust, and he was given to leaving Dolly to manage his business affairs while he wandered off to sail the South Seas or fish the streams of Alaska—and spending so much on his adventures that he came close to bankruptcy more than once. More positively, writes May, Grey was an outdoorsman and athlete par excellence, a “freshwater fisherman, baseball pitcher, explorer, nature lover, sailor, adventurer, [and] saltwater angler,” to say nothing of an extraordinarily prolific and competent writer. For many years, like his hero Theodore Roosevelt, he filled the role of the macho man of letters, a role that would be usurped by Grey’s later contemporary Ernest Hemingway. (Hemingway, the author reveals, rebuffed Grey’s repeated invitations to go deep-sea fishing, fearing “that Grey might take the opportunity to cash in on Hemingway’s popularity.”) Though he is best known for his Western novels, May suggests that Grey deserves critical recognition as an outstanding interpreter of the outdoors and as something of a proto-environmentalist, instead of being shelved as a minor genre writer. His argument in this regard is entirely convincing, backed with ample quotations from Grey’s published writings and unpublished journals.
A fine job: May’s attentions may well inspire new interest in Grey’s largely forgotten work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8214-1316-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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