Not quite: half-untold, half-old is more like it, along with a ton of reprints and a pound of self-promotion, in this so-so look at investigative biography. According to Weinberg (Journalism/Univ. of Missouri; Armand Hammer, 1989), the biographical arts changed forever in 1975, when Robert Caro published his Pulitzer-winning The Power Broker. Until then, biography had belonged to scholars writing objective lives of dead subjects; suddenly, it fell into the hands of journalists muckraking about the living. After a brief history of the genre (earlier groundbreakers: Boswell and Strachey), Weinberg digs into The Power Broker, as well as the first volumes of Caro's LBJ bio, to show how a ruthless search for sources (e.g., tracking down every living grammar-school classmate of Johnson's) and a high-wire writing style revolutionized the field. In similar fashion, Weinberg pores over the work of Donald Barlett and James Steele (``the best team in the history of investigative reporting''), showing how their brilliant Philadelphia Inquirer exposÇs of the IRS, the FHA, and so on came through obsessive detective work. Perhaps to add the personal touch, Weinberg also describes his own methods in writing his biography of Armand Hammer. A look at magazine profiles follows, along with a litany of the obstacles, mostly legal, put in biographers' paths. Weinberg offers 11 guidelines to good biography; he also includes loads of reprints, including: ``A Note on Sources'' from each of the Caro works; a minibiography by Barlett and Steele from a nuclear-waste exposÇ; a New Yorker Calvin Trillin profile of a police reporter; a scathing Washington Post Magazine exposÇ of Kitty Kelley; and, without a blush, a Los Angeles Times piece that heaps praise on his own Hammer biography. Useful for biographer-wannabes. Otherwise, read Kelley for kicks, Caro for crack reporting, Boswell for brilliance.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8262-0873-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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
SEEN & HEARD
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