A thoughtful portrait of two forceful, talented women, their lives while together and apart, and their enormous impact on the life and career of the author. Murray, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and author of the Shifty Lou Anderson racetrack mysteries (A Fine Italian Hand, 1996, etc.), was 14 in 1940 when his mother, Natalia, then 38, began a lifelong love affair with Flanner, ten years her senior. He describes Flanner, who became a sort of surrogate father, as a “wonderfully genial eagle” and a “benevolent angel” who provided counsel, guidance, and support; his mother, “an explosive force of nature,” was both his greatest friend and most dangerous antagonist. Although Murray opens his account with Flanner’s death in 1978 and then shifts back to the 1940 meeting, the narrative is basically chronological, interweaving their life stories and his own. Both Murray and his mother, who was born in Rome, lived at various times in Italy as well as the US; Flanner, whose New Yorker column, “Letter from Paris,” established her as a brilliant journalist, spent most of her time in France, moving to New York to live with Natalia only in 1975, after she retired. The extended separation of the two women, though for a time the source of unhappiness, also nurtured and sustained the love affair, Murray thinks. Keenly appreciative of Flanner’s writing, he lingers over her work and over her relationship with the New Yorker editors, as he does his own efforts to find his voice as a writer and his New Yorker experiences. By comparison, his mother’s career in publishing gets short shrift. Natalia Murray, who wrote a more guarded account of her relationship with Flanner in Darlinghissima (1985), would probably be disconcerted by this one; to Flanner’s many admirers it will be both revealing and gratifying. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-80966-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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