Takes the measure of Wilson’s achievement, but not his mesmeric personality. (b&w illustrations, not seen)
An earnest but flawed biography of the man Aldous Huxley described as “the greatest social architect of the twentieth century.”
A vast Alcoholics Anonymous archive, including hundreds of letters, helps novelist and memoirist Cheever (As Good As I Could Be, 2001, etc.) plumb the lifelong drive, intelligence, and self-doubt of AA cofounder Bill Wilson (1895–1971). Growing up in rural Vermont, Wilson witnessed principles of service and egalitarianism in action that he later embodied in AA’s famous “Twelve Traditions.” But he also felt unmoored when his parents divorced and his mother left him in the care of her father as she pursued a medical degree. Marriage to an educated older socialite fed his insecurity, eased only when he took his first drink while serving in WWI. Over the next 18 years, his growing addiction resulted in countless jobs lost or never pursued. Cheever is at her best in detailing the creation of AA, in 1935, by Dr. Bob Smith and Wilson, who recognized that alcoholism was a disease that could only be countered by a “Power greater than ourselves.” The synthesis of ideas drawn from medicine, psychology, and moral reformers such as the Oxford Group and the Washington Temperance Movement provided a flexibility that enabled AA to grow to 30,000 members by 1946. Cheever acknowledges that Wilson was “not the stuff of saints,” particularly after turning over AA to elected representatives in 1956. (He used his newfound freedom to experiment with LSD, Oujia boards, and extramarital relationships.) Her own experiences as a recovering alcoholic (see Note Found in a Bottle, 1999) deepen the author’s insight into AA’s philosophy and Wilson’s struggles, and she writes lyrically about the environments in which her subject sometimes took refuge from his fame. But Cheever settles too often for clichés (“We are the most puritanical country on earth, and the most profligate”), and although she tells readers about Wilson’s charisma, she does not make us feel it.
Takes the measure of Wilson’s achievement, but not his mesmeric personality. (b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-0154-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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