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ALICE ADAMS

PORTRAIT OF A WRITER

Pervasive, deep research informs this inspiring story of a writer who demonstrably earned such a sturdy, illuminating...

A thorough and often surprising life of the celebrated author of short stories and novels.

Sklenicka, whose earlier biography (Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 2009) earned high praise, returns with an intimate, detailed life of Adams (1926-1999), who did not begin publishing regularly until the mid-1960s. But when she did, she received recognition quickly. By the time she died of heart failure, she had established herself as a gifted, perceptive, and popular writer, publishing stories often in the New Yorker and books with Knopf. As Sklenicka relates, she enjoyed some hefty paydays. The author focuses mostly on a couple areas of Adams’ life: her writing and her active love life. Frequently, Sklenicka points out how deeply Adams drew from her own life to inspire her fiction; she wrote about settings and people that she knew. As Sklenicka reports, frequently, Adams was an attractive woman who displayed a great sense of sexual freedom. One brief marriage was followed by a lengthy cohabitation with another man (it didn’t end well), and once she became financially secure, she enjoyed travel, fine food, and a nice house in San Francisco. Sklenicka also charts Adams’ acceptance of the women’s liberation movement and writes perceptively about her relationship with her gay son. The author doesn’t provide much information about Adams’ work routines, but there is a deep undercurrent of admiration that sometimes bubbles to the surface. “Alice Adams lived for love and for stories,” writes Sklenicka. “Her courage and vulnerability, tenderness and tenacity allowed her to break the strictures of her upbringing and transform her intense emotional sensibility into enduring short stories and novels that illuminate women’s lives in the twentieth century.” Near the end, Sklenicka herself appears in a startling tale about Adams’ ashes.

Pervasive, deep research informs this inspiring story of a writer who demonstrably earned such a sturdy, illuminating biography.

Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4516-2131-0

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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