Though Bair can at times seem like a referee deciding which version of Nin's life is most accurate, this exhaustive account of the former feminist icon is impressive. The challenge of writing about Nin is the wealth of often disparate sources. Nin's published diaries, her fiction, and her ``unexpurgated'' diaries combine to give conflicting accounts of this bigamous woman whose most famous love affair was with Henry Miller. Bair (Simone de Beauvoir, 1990, etc.) gained access to the originals of the diaries (the unexpurgated versions were, in fact, heavily edited), Nin's voluminous correspondence, and many intimate friends, lovers, and spouses. The resulting biography is a fine one that traces Nin from her beginnings in Cuba, through her move to New York as a teenager; her life in Paris; her shuttling between New York, Mexico, and California; her literary career, which did little but sputter until the publication of her edited diaries in the 1970s, to her death from cancer in 1977. The engine that drove Nin and drives this story are her affairs, which began with her tumultuous relationship with Henry and June Miller. Bair describes the endless line of lovers, including Gore Vidal (they never consummated the relationship), other women, and her own father. Throughout, Hugh Parker Guiler, the husband she married while still young, remains with her, staying out of the way of her extramarital life to the extent that she was able to have a second husband on an opposite coast for over a decade. Along with the steady stream of peccadilloes, Bair offers just enough small details, such as the movies Nin went to see, to personalize the narrative. The only fault of the book is that Bair at times goes on too long in presenting all sides of debates over which version of various events is most true. Bair's Nin emerges as the complex woman she was, a woman who inspired both wrath and passion in those whose paths crossed hers.
Pub Date: March 8, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-13988-5
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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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