Gregorian made an important life for himself the old-fashioned way, by earning every little bit of it.
The restless Gregorian—presidencies at the New York Public Library, Brown University, the Carnegie Corporation—offers a memoir that expertly blends poetry, pedantry, progressivism, and unruly university politics.
By his fourth sentence, Gregorian is already engaged in a scholarly discourse on the identity of biblical rivers—and so the book continues, with Gregorian always happy to drop in a few lines of Robert Frost, say, or to explain how The Sorrows of Young Werther captures his feelings after a love affair falls apart. For Gregorian is all about brains—big brains, using them nimbly, honestly, compassionately—starting with his grandmother’s teachings when he was a poor youth in Tabriz, Iran, right through to his present post at the Carnegie Corporation. Getting there wasn’t easy, and what a story it makes: leaving Iran, alone and destitute, to study in Beirut; gaining entrance to Stanford; and teaching at San Francisco State in the mid- to late-1960s (where he was faculty advisor to the Progressive Labor Party: Gregorian is equally at ease talking about the vagaries of the history of the Caucasus or about the split in SDS). The author bounces from the University of Texas to Penn, keeping one hand busy with his teaching while dipping the other into the mire of university politics. He is brilliant in delineating the backstabbing, pettiness, and obfuscations he contended with in order to raise the level of educational quality when he was dean at various schools. He has a light touch, knowing when to coax the reader gently through an intricate piece of philanthropic politics, and when to let rip: “I was not a Mr. Magoo. If somebody spits at me, I cannot pretend it is a raindrop.” His stint at the NYPL and now at Carnegie allows him to fuse learning with philanthropy—but his loss from academia is a great one.
Gregorian made an important life for himself the old-fashioned way, by earning every little bit of it.Pub Date: June 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-80834-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
