A superb, highly readable addition to the history of 20th-century American letters.
Allen Ginsberg, gay beatnik/hippie antinomian poet nomad—and American hero?
Morgan, Ginsberg’s longtime bibliographer and archivist, responsible for the sale of Ginsberg’s papers to Stanford University and thus for Ginsberg’s relative comfort in his last, dying days, is also an excellent writer and storyteller. His massive life of the poet turns out to be flawed only by its brevity. The year 1994 gets five pages, for instance; in that year, Ginsberg taught college, studied Buddhism, wrote, gave and hosted readings, starred in a Gap ad campaign to fund the Naropa Institute, released a four-CD box set of musical compositions and hung out in San Francisco and Paris, all the while nursing a bad heart. Morgan situates Ginsberg’s life in a Jewish radical tradition, in an ethnic ethic of hard work, learning and resistance to authority; sadly, Ginsberg’s corner of the shtetl was also visited by mental illness, his mother institutionalized, as the poet himself would be. A nice boy of academic gifts and even genius, Ginsberg fell into the wrong crowd on entering college, with the likes of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Lucien Carr; for his troubles, he would be constantly broke, be expelled from Columbia, be jailed, be hospitalized—and also be liberated to write such epochal poems as Howl and Kaddish, which, half a century on, are regarded as nearly canonical. In the great spirit of honor among thieves, Ginsberg remained poor and free for most of his life, doing very much as he wanted (as evidenced, among other things, by being treated for STDs many, many times). Some of the bits of news that float out of Morgan’s lyrical narrative: Ginsberg was one of the earliest experimenters with LSD. He traveled everywhere and knew everyone. He suffered from stage fright. He was fearless and selfless—hence the hero rubric. Oh, and Jack Kerouac never had a driver’s license.
A superb, highly readable addition to the history of 20th-century American letters.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03796-6
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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