A concise, useful examination of a novel that, at its heart, is a “wise and merciful book” about the love of teaching.
Literary criticism/memoir regarding an overlooked American novel.
In the latest volume in the publisher’s Bookmarked series, Almond (Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, 2018, etc.) delivers an energetic discussion of Stoner, the 1965 novel by John Williams (1922-1994), who won a National Book Award for Augustus (1972). The Bookmarked series encourages authors to personally engage with the works they are championing, and Almond delves into personal failures and accomplishments as well as relationships with family, friends, and students, all through the prism of Stoner. Though some readers may find this approach disruptive, it results in a sensitive and perceptive reading of a novel Almond first read when he was a struggling 28-year-old writer. He has since read it innumerable times, each time learning more about the novel and himself. Stoner, which has been reissued a few times, is a quiet, reflective tale that recounts the life of a rural farm boy who becomes an English professor, husband, and father. Almond offers this “peculiar pint-sized ode” to a novel that has become for him a manual for “living.” A “literary novel” that is also “subversive,” Stoner “casts a piercing light upon the worship of power and wealth that has corroded our national spirit.” Almond loves how it “captures with unbearable fidelity the moments of internal tumult that mark every human life.” At times, he gets “furious” with William Stoner the “perfect martyr,” the “hardcore masochist.” He discusses the novel’s “unrelieved narration,” or “plain style,” as Williams described it, and its portrayal of a wrecked marriage, the nasty world of academic in-fighting, and the challenges of child-rearing. Almond argues that Stoner is both an anti-war novel and, with its detailed portrait of the “collision of poverty and privilege,” a “radical social novel.”
A concise, useful examination of a novel that, at its heart, is a “wise and merciful book” about the love of teaching.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63246-087-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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