An empathic, highly informative celebration of the legacy of a profoundly decent but decidedly imperfect man who considered...
A buoyant, expressive biography of British novelist E.M. Forster (1879–1970), whose homosexuality had a profound effect on his literary output and career.
In her first book, Moffat (English/Dickinson Coll.) leaves no doubt about her focus. The prologue takes its title from a quote: “Start with the Fact That He Was Homosexual.” As does the first chapter: “A Queer Moment.” Though the author examines the sex life of Forster, it isn’t her intent to arouse prurient interest or to grind political axes. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, this sexual-literary biography builds a convincing case that until one comes to terms with Forster’s homosexuality, which he long had difficulty coming to terms with himself, it is impossible to come to terms with his work. Moffat’s novelistic command of detail reinforces the sense of intimacy, though those more accustomed to academic convention might not be comfortable with her referring throughout to her subject as “Morgan” (as his friends did), and with her use of first names and even nicknames for other principal characters. Yet such familiarity suits a narrative that illuminates the soul of a writer who suffered from such “paralyzing shyness” that he feared through his mid-30s that he might never consummate a sexual relationship, who long considered the act of homosexual love “unspeakable” and therefore unpublishable, yet “to the end of his life…recognized the sexual force as a wellspring of his creative work.” The biography begins with and then builds to the posthumous publication of Maurice (1971), the homosexually themed work that had occupied his creativity for decades when the public thought he had retired from novel writing, and which underwent substantial revisions after Forster gained experience in not only sex but homosexual love.
An empathic, highly informative celebration of the legacy of a profoundly decent but decidedly imperfect man who considered himself “the outsidest of outsiders.”Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-16678-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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