Athill, a veteran London editor who 25 years ago published the autobiography of a black American militant, offers an engrossing account of their friendship—an account written with the same openness that apparently characterized an earlier memoir (After a Funeral, 1984—not reviewed). Hakim Jamal was born Al Donaldson in 1933 Boston. An unloved child, he was a wino at 12, an addict at 14, and a convict at 20- -until hearing Malcolm X turned his life around. Hakim, meanwhile, was immensely attractive to women. His one marriage (to a distant cousin of Malcolm's) lasted long enough to produce six kids; what ended it was his tempestuous affair with the actress Jean Seberg. Soon afterward, in 1969, he met Athill. They hit it off immediately. Looking past his rhetorical bluster, she found ``a touchstone for kindness and honesty.'' They became friends and occasional lovers; 14 years his senior, Athill felt a primarily maternal love (with a ``delicious'' whiff of incest). Then she noticed signs of craziness. Hakim really believed he was God, as did his love-blind English mistress, HalÇ. The heart of Athill's story here is an electrifying, 48-hour, three-way confrontation provoked by Hakim's return to the States; Hakim accuses Athill of possessing HalÇ's body, and Athill sees that Hakim's ``kind and loving madness'' has a frightening side (though her fear soon passes). Athill concludes that Hakim ``had an acute natural intelligence...increasingly confused by psychological disturbance''—a disturbance that led her to break off work on Hakim's second book (about Seberg). His downward spiral continued; his death, back in Boston, was violent and meaningless. Athill's charm, and her power, lies in her refusal to censor herself. Her partial self-portrait is unflinching; her portrait of Hakim is devastating. High-quality work that lights up the first list of this brand-new house.
Pub Date: March 30, 1994
ISBN: 1-883642-21-3
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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