A revealing exploration of Ellison’s life and work.
A superb biography of the noted African-American writer and the tormented times in which he lived.
It is literature’s misfortune that Ralph Ellison (1913–94) never produced a novel after Invisible Man, which took him seven traumatic years to write. As Rampersad (English/Stanford Univ.; Jackie Robinson, 1997, etc.) chronicles, Ellison received accolade after accolade following its publication: the National Book Award, presidential medals, honorary doctorates, “a cascading flow of honors such as no other African-American writer had ever enjoyed.” Success may have ruined Ellison; he developed a taste for the good life, first-class travel, nice surroundings—a far remove from his Oklahoma childhood. Rising from poverty, Ellison trained as a musician and engaged in an activist politics that launched him as a writer. Long afterward, his failure to produce cost him the use of a university secretary, but he had tenure, and plenty of other universities were always trying to woo him away. That failure and the gossip it yielded within the academy made Ellison bitter and hostile, of a piece with his transformation from prewar Communist to postwar conservative, at least of a cultural kind. It is in this second guise that Ellison fought his fiercest battles, waged against the likes of Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka, as he “deplored the popularity of black ‘demagogues’ and the habit of idolizing ex-pimps and ex-prisoners . . . which ‘gave many kids the notion that there was no point in developing their minds.’ ” Ellison’s battles with other African-American writers, such as Langston Hughes, led to his alienation from their company, but not from the canon. Rampersad writes of such matters with a mix of amusement and sorrow, noting how they drained Ellison of his energies and clearly wishing that Ellison had found “a way to that second triumph of fiction of which he had been dreaming . . . for almost thirty-five years.”
A revealing exploration of Ellison’s life and work.Pub Date: April 20, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-40827-4
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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