Kunkel cannot solve the mystery, but he offers a finely delineated portrait of the man.
The strange trajectory of one writer’s career.
Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996) joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1938, quickly earning praise for deft profiles of unusual figures: the bearded circus performer Lady Olga, for example, a gypsy king, and a Native American who worked high above the city on bridges and skyscrapers. The magazine’s founder and editor, Harold Ross, called Mitchell “an exemplar of a Fact writer—a lovely and clean stylist, and someone who brought plenty of fresh characters to the magazine.” In this illuminating biography, Kunkel (President/St. Norbert Coll.; Enormous Prayers: A Journey into the Priesthood, 1998, etc.), a former reporter and editor whose previous books include a life of Ross, portrays Mitchell as a driven perfectionist with a “near-obsession, cultivated over a decade pounding pavement for newspapers, with the city’s ‘lowlife,’ as that class was known around the editorial offices of the New Yorker.” A hugely prolific writer in the 1940s, his output waned in the next decade and ended in 1965 after he wrote a long profile of the eccentric Joe Gould, a drunk and a derelict who boasted that he had written a multimillion-word Oral History of Our Time. Gould had a special attraction for Mitchell, who, by the 1960s, hoping to produce an autobiography, was finding it increasingly hard to write. As he told an interviewer, he found Gould so compelling “[b]ecause he is me.” With the cooperation of Mitchell’s family, friends and colleagues, and steeped in New Yorker lore and personalities, Kunkel examines Mitchell’s devotion to his family, his recurring depressions and his relationship with Ross, his successor, William Shawn, and fellow writer A.J. Liebling. Everyone was mystified by the last three decades of Mitchell’s life, when he arrived each day at the magazine, closeted himself in his office and produced absolutely nothing.
Kunkel cannot solve the mystery, but he offers a finely delineated portrait of the man.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-375-50890-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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