An occasionally enticing if episodic inquest into Greene's lifelong balancing act on ``the dangerous edge of things'' (his favorite Browning quote). Armed with findings from Greene archives at Boston College and the University of Texas, Austin, West's (editor, Orwell: The War Commentaries, 1986) book amends some neglected points in Norman Sherry's thoroughly researched, ongoing authorized biography (1989, 1994), disputes much of Michael Sheldon's animus-driven Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (1995), and corrects Greene's own misleading memoirs. The sometimes scattered results of West's quest for the real Greene do not form a compelling or truly coherent psychological portrait—conjectures about Greene's adolescent breakdown and his relationship with his psychoanalyst (and the analyst's wife), for example, are especially tenuous—but they do score a few intriguing points. His big coup, tied together from several sources, is the secret behind Greene's self-exile from England in 1966. The scenario, which involved one Tom Roe, Greene's dubious financial advisor, who was mixed up with counterfeiters and Hollywood Mafia, and Roe's disastrous and fraudulent handling of some of Greene's off-shore investments, is as seamy as any in his novels (and West finds some inside jokes about currency smuggling in Travels with My Aunt). More often, though, West only dutifully brings to light peripheral players, such as James Hadley Chase, a thriller writer Greene edited while working in publishing after the war, and Ben Greene, a pacifist cousin who was a political internee during the Blitz, without making solid claims to their roles in Greene's life. Even his revelations about Greene's continuing relationship with the double-agent Kim Philby, including their later correspondence in the last phase of the Cold War, await complete disclosure. While Greene aficionados anticipate Sherry's next volume, West supplies them with some tantalizing points and leaves open many, many questions. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18161-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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