An enjoyable extended footnote to the lives of the better known.
An engaging account of an author and his editor wife who may be obscure even to critics of modernist literature.
Here is a biography in which the supporting cast generates most of the interest. Klaidman (Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry, 2007, etc.) recognizes that it was a challenge proposing such a book when “only a small number of scholars and aficionados of the modern period had ever heard of the Schiffs.” Yet Sydney and Violet Schiff were well-known to the likes of Proust, Eliot, Joyce and Picasso, with whom they socialized and corresponded. They hosted a literary salon, and they served as patrons of the arts. They were also literary figures themselves, he the author and she his editor of A True Story, a Proustian series of autobiographical novels that were praised at the time by their famous friends but have since succumbed to obscurity. It isn’t necessarily Klaidman’s intent to generate interest in work he believes has been unjustly neglected, but to explore the literary London of a century ago—when it was “the undisputed capital of the literary world…the baptismal font of modernism”—through the experiences and particularly the letters of a couple in the midst of its social swirl. Some dismissed them as “rich poseurs” and “fawning acolytes” (particularly toward Proust), while Eliot once wrote after a visit that they were “very nice Jews.” The book builds toward the savage skewering of the Schiffs by Wyndham Lewis, a painter who had accepted both their friendship and their money, in his novel The Apes of the Gods, “published in 1930 and…almost immediately forgotten because most of it is hopelessly obscure unless you are intimately familiar with the lives of the real people who were its hapless targets.” Few readers will be, though they’ll know more about the Schiffs after finishing this book than almost anyone knew before.
An enjoyable extended footnote to the lives of the better known.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53409-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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