Prone to benign mischief, a literary twinkle in the eye, Buckley nails his targets more often than not yet likewise has fun...
Buckley (They Eat Puppies, Don't They?, 2012, etc.) offers stylishness and nimble wordplay in this latest collection of (generally) lightweight ruminations on contemporary culture and its foibles.
The author caroms from personal history and travel to criticism and politics, wielding a sense of humor that pirouettes from gentle to sardonic. His subjects sometimes seem too trivial to merit inclusion, and his takes on these absurdities are amusing but instantly forgettable. Yet such is the nature of the beast; most of these brief, previously published magazine essays never were intended to be more than mildly diverting, and a blithe tenor is arguably the right approach in skewering some of the more outlandish affronts. At the other end of the spectrum, seeming almost out of place in this volume, is his stark chronicle of touring Auschwitz. The strongest chapter of the book is “Farewells,” featuring Buckley's posthumous remembrances of such longtime friends as Joseph Heller and Christopher Hitchens, not to mention his father William F. Buckley's celebrated nemesis, Gore Vidal. These pieces are especially revealing, often touching, and find Buckley dispensing with his breezy tone for a timbre that is much more sober. Particularly poignant is his piece on Hitchens, a man he revered. Given their due in the “Criticism” section, among others, are Graham Greene, P.G. Wodehouse and Ray Bradbury. Buckley's outstanding introduction to The Stories of Ray Bradbury (2010) is a richly deserved paean to one of the most influential writers of the late 20th century. Though a clear and self-deprecating writer, Buckley sometimes wears his erudition on his sleeve, echoing his late father's penchant for extravagant polysyllabic effusions—e.g., “chrestomathies,” “diapasons,” “froideurs” and “vernissages.” Secure a dictionary.
Prone to benign mischief, a literary twinkle in the eye, Buckley nails his targets more often than not yet likewise has fun with unexpected asides, like the “excruciatingly chaste” plays of the otherwise notorious Marquis de Sade.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4951-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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