A thoroughly classy profile of the famously demanding founder and editor of the New Yorker. In getting this well-rounded portrait of Ross (18921951) on paper, the first-time biographer has balanced large details with small. Kunkel straightforwardly records how a high-school dropout, bitten by the reporting bug, propelled himself from the American West into WW I (where he helped develop Stars and Stripes) and then in 1925 was positioned for launching what was long considered the world's best magazine. Which was not, Ross wrote in his prospectus (included here), meant to attract ``the old lady from Dubuque.'' Ross slapped his materializing dream into shape with the aid of writers, editors, and friends like Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, John O'Hara, Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, Katharine Angell White, William Shawn, and James Cagney. They're all here, waving their tics and peccadilloes like banners. He details the intricacies of Ross's troubled relationships with his three wives and with co-founder Raoul Fleischmann. A prankster and a worrier, and a man with hair like ``a privet hedge'' and ``a notoriously limp handshake,'' Ross had many qualities that recommended him—and lots that didn't. Kunkel doesn't miss any of it—the Algonquin Round Table, the meager Depression coverage, the extensive WW II coverage, the decision to run John Hersey's ``Hiroshima''—while making the overriding point that no one racks up these kinds of accomplishments by accident; he dispels the popular ``caricature'' of Ross as a rude rube who miraculously produced the urbane New Yorker. Kunkel observes that ``the man from Aspen was an outsider set loose in New York, exhilarated, intimidated, and appalled by turns at what he saw, but never, ever bored.'' Kunkel writes with such fair-mindedness and so convincingly that readers, including the old lady from Dubuque, will need to remind themselves that they didn't know Ross personally.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41837-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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