In her long and eventful life, Laura Riding (1901-91) played, according to Baker (Making a Farm, 1981, etc.—not reviewed), the roles of goddess, witch, poet, editor, critic, mistress, collaborator, inspiration, demon, and recluse. Born to a mad mother and a reprobate father on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Riding became a poet and, after a brief stay in Greenwich Village, joined the household of Robert Graves, who became her lover/companion for 14 years. She traveled to Egypt, London (where she attempted suicide), and Mallorca (for a 13-year period covered extensively by Baker)—where she ran a press, published Gertrude Stein, and developed a following of young literati who shared her ideas of communal life. At the start of WW II, Riding and Graves became the guests of Schuylar Jackson, who grew walnut trees in New Hope, Pennsylvania. After Riding reputedly drove Mrs. Jackson insane, she married Schuylar, destroyed her own poetry, invested many years in compiling a dictionary, and, finally, retired for the last 50 years of her life to a tin-roofed hut, without electricity or plumbing, in Wabasso, Florida. In her lifetime, Riding published over a dozen influential collections of poems and collaborated with Graves on an essay in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) that helped initiate the modern age of criticism. She was, Baker says in this first full-length biography, offended by the moral ambiguity of Graves's The White Goddess—which she herself inspired. (Eight page of b&w photographs)
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1364-8
Page Count: 462
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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