A rewarding read about the inner workings of an artistic mind—solid fare for Hemingway enthusiasts looking for a fresh...
A unique biography of Ernest Hemingway’s World War II experience.
At first glance, Hemingway’s decision to volunteer to hunt for German U-boats threatening mercantile ships in the Gulf Stream can be easily absorbed into the author’s tough-guy image, especially considering that the Pilar was a fishing boat on which he could drink and boss other men around on the Navy’s dime. Yet former Navyman Mort’s portrait is far more nuanced. The author views these patrols as a synthesis of life and art, arguing that Hemingway embodied his own existential “Hemingway Hero” during these hunts—or quests, as Hemingway himself preferred to call them. It was this quest that would shape much of Santiago’s saga in The Old Man and the Sea—and, to a lesser extent, Islands in the Stream. At times Mort’s analysis of Hemingway’s words and deeds is overly sympathetic, but his inclusion of Martha Gellhorn’s correspondence adds a welcome perspective on this complicated man. While the information specifically relating to Hemingway’s time aboard the Pilar is stretched quite thin, Mort is strongest in his discussions of boats, the naval history of the period and the mechanics of the elusive U-boat—so strong, in fact, that Hemingway’s quest occasionally takes a back seat to the grander maritime developments of the period. But Mort ably establishes the earnestness at the heart of Hemingway’s quixotic adventure, which was rooted in his deep desire to serve his country and underscored by the unique opportunity to live his art.
A rewarding read about the inner workings of an artistic mind—solid fare for Hemingway enthusiasts looking for a fresh perspective.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9786-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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