A disappointing new biography of the nonpareil hardboiled writer. Alcoholic, fastidious, prickly, chivalrous, classically educated, Chandler was a bundle of contradictions. A legendary misogynist in fiction, he was devoted for most of his life to a much older wife. When she died, he obsessively sought solace in drink and the company of other women. He was also, on Hiney's showing, a man with a rare inaptness for comfort or self- satisfaction, a writer who found work painfully difficult yet became unmoored away from his desk, whose success as a screenwriter never mitigated his contempt for Hollywood, and a man to whom both reclusiveness (he wrote the first four Philip Marlowe novels in isolation from anyone but his beloved wife, Cissy) and socialization (his final year was punctuated by so many marriage proposals that two of his aspiring fiancÇes ended up in court over his will) were equally necessary and equally impossible. Readers who know Frank MacShane's 1976 biography of Chandler will be familiar with these matters. What London journalist Hiney adds is a new look at the Chandler archives and new interviews with the friends of his declining years; what's missing is any forceful new assessment of Chandler's personality and achievement as a writer. Hiney's inexperience as a biographer shows in his lack of confidence in his generalizations about Chandler's alcoholism, his early critical reception (though Chandler scorned highbrow intellectuals, they were faster to appreciate his work than mainstream reviewers), and his still- debated status in American letters. On Chandler's troubled personal life, Hiney admits that ``Cissy remains almost as much of an enigma now'' as when she and Chandler married, and ventures the conclusion, on slender grounds, that ``Chandler was, I am sure, a good man and an honest one.'' Hiney ends up nibbling around the edges of Chandler's life and work, as if he'd bitten off more than he could chew. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87113-690-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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