Masterful: a refreshing break from our tell-all world.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet’s stylish coming-of-age memoir.
Born in 1927, the son of a Presbyterian pastor, Merwin (The Ends of the Earth, 2004, etc.) grew up poor in Pennsylvania. His father was harsh and distant, rarely speaking to him unless a disciplinary issue needed addressing. (The author’s mother is shadowy, largely absent from this account.) Merwin worked his way through Princeton, where he discovered modern poetry: García Lorca, Stevens, Eliot and Pound. He wasn’t the only budding poet in Tigertown; he waited tables with none other than Galway Kinnell. Merwin captures the seriousness of that period, recalling his shock when the atom bomb was dropped on Japan: “I felt a wave of cold, then of disbelief and denial, reactions which have affected the world ever since that evening.” After college, Merwin married and found work as a private tutor. His lovely text offers more than autobiography; it’s also a setpiece that evokes a more gracious era, in which those in the leisure class seemed to enjoy their leisure. In the summer, Merwin’s tutoring gig took him to Europe. There, he flirted with older women, mixed with an Irish novelist who “liked his red wine at all hours of the day,” witnessed an attempted suicide and listened to his intellectual interlocutors hold forth on everything from Franco to fine art. Merwin offers less insight when writing about himself. He seems, for example, oblivious to the Freudian reading invited by his constrained descriptions of women and marriage. (His first marriage was “thoughtless,” his wife “agreeable, equable, and attractive.”) Readers accustomed to memoirs that spill every gratuitous, salacious detail might grow frustrated with this mannerly approach.
Masterful: a refreshing break from our tell-all world.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59376-072-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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