A punctilious and perceptive biography of Arthur Koestler, whose 1940 novel Darkness At Noon became part of the intellectual arsenal that eventually brought down the Berlin Wall. Koestler, claims Cesarani (History/Southampton Univ.), was a brilliant journalist and “an outstanding chronicler of his times.” He wrote novels, two volumes of autobiography, and countless essays. A man of the left and a member of the between-the-wars “pink” generation, he criticized the USSR and communism at a time when both were immensely popular and powerful, especially among the intelligentsia. Friendly with Sartre, Orwell, and Camus, he was also the quintessential Wandering Jew whose only real home was his mind. Though charming and kind, Koestler often quarreled with his friends and treated women abominably: He raped the wife of a good friend, was unfaithful to his own three spouses, and, Cesarani suggests, persuaded his much younger third wife to commit suicide with him in 1983 even though her health, unlike his, was good. Born in 1905 in Hungary, Koestler lived through a better childhood than his autobiography claimed, but his uncomfortable family, together with the dislocations of war and revolution, explained much of his subsequent behavior as well as his search for a permanent home. Attracted first to Zionism, he began his journalistic career in Palestine in the 1920s, then moved on to communism until his experiences in the USSR and the Spanish War changed his mind, and finally embraced parascience. Dealing with Koestler’s background, his writing, and his compulsive traveling, home-buying, and womanizing, Cesarani concludes that the writer’s “relationship with his Jewishness is fundamental to understanding the man and his work, and, by extension, the condition of post-modernity.” Both a splendid biography of one of the century’s great minds and a vivid history of the period, especially the years when revolution was in the air and totalitarianism on the rise.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86720-6
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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