Anna Yezierska she’s not, but Gallagher does offer some charming vignettes.
Episodic reflections on a literary life.
Gallagher here tells tales of her Russian-immigrant Jewish family and her own slow beginnings as a writer. Her depiction of her family, at times, seems almost a caricature (when shopping for a party dress, for example, her mother and aunts looked only for models that could be worn with the price tags tucked in—so that it could be returned the morning after the gala). When the author, as a young woman, first expressed her hope of becoming a writer, her parents were predictably dubious (especially as her first bylines appeared in a pulp magazine): What kind of work was that for a nice Jewish girl? They were, however, just as predictably satisfied when she published her first book. The biography she wrote (of an obscure Italian anarchist) had a difficult birth, to put it mildly: an editor at Knopf signed her up and subsequently rejected her manuscript as unpublishable. Later on, a university press picked it up, and it garnered acclaim in the New York Times and other respectable venues. While the inside account of the author’s first book is of moderate interest, some of her portrayals of the creative process are downright bizarre. Gallagher goes on at some length to describe an essay she wanted to write about a family friend who was found murdered in her apartment in a rundown part of town. She sees it as a perfect expression of contemporary social history—an elderly Jew in a neighborhood that is no longer Jewish, a body found in a bathtub, a mysterious dark-skinned man leaving the premises. But it turns out that there was no dark-skinned man—the prime suspect was the dead woman’s money-hungry daughter. How, muses Gallagher, could she write her brilliant article without the Negro?
Anna Yezierska she’s not, but Gallagher does offer some charming vignettes.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50346-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
SEEN & HEARD
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