“I am in the pigeon-hole marked ‘no threat,’ ” Bennett writes of his reputation for niceness. “And did I stab Judi Dench...
The third installment of diaries from the celebrated dramatist and author.
For a butcher’s son from Leeds, Bennett (Smut: Two Unseemly Stories, 2011, etc.) has done exceedingly well for himself. From his early days as a member of Beyond the Fringe—he modestly calls himself “a less talented performer” than Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, or Jonathan Miller—he has since become the author of such celebrated plays as The Madness of George III and The History Boys. To many readers, he may be just as famous for his diaries, which have appeared annually in the London Review of Books for 30 years. Like its predecessors, Writing Home (1995) and Untold Stories (2006), this book contains a decade of his diary entries. Fans will recognize Bennett in these pages: riding his bike, buying antiques, visiting medieval churches, and, as always, enjoying his lovingly described sandwiches. Part of the charm of these entries is the mix of the mundane and the glamorous. In a senior moment, he can’t find a favorite sweater, and his partner has to tell him he’s wearing it. Next, he’s meeting the likes of Judi Dench, Tom Stoppard, Elizabeth Taylor (who sat on his knee at a party, although he doesn’t remember why), and John F. Kennedy. The second half of the book includes introductions to his later plays, speeches, and two unproduced scripts, but the highlights are the diaries. Bennett makes just about everything sound poetic, as when he writes that a routine colonoscopy reveals “a little fairy ring of polyps, innocent enough but ruthlessly lassoed and garrotted by the radiographer.” And who wouldn’t smile upon reading that, at the post office, an elderly customer recognized Bennett and commanded, “Say something whimsical”?
“I am in the pigeon-hole marked ‘no threat,’ ” Bennett writes of his reputation for niceness. “And did I stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a teddy bear.” That may be debatable, but the good-naturedness in these engaging pages is proof of his current standing.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-18105-5
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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