Expansive and lavish, this outstanding biography does much to demythologize Carter, revealing her to be a singular writer of...
The first comprehensive biography of the acclaimed British author.
In his debut, Gordon (English/King’s Coll. London) has done yeoman’s work crafting an authorized, sensitive, and well-written biography of an ebullient writer whose “ novels, short stories and journalism…stood defiantly apart from the work of her contemporaries.” She was largely ignored until she died (1940-1992), when the mythmaking began in earnest. Gordon focuses on how “she invented herself.” His portrait of the prolific writer who described herself as a “born fabulist” travels from her “shy, introverted childhood, through a nervy, aggressively unconventional youth, to a happy, self-confident middle age.” Born into a “matriarchal clan,” her mother wanted to control her, but her grandmother raised her “as a tough, arrogant and pragmatic Yorkshire child.” After school, Carter became a journalist and married a folk musician. College came later. Exposure to Baudelaire and Rimbaud convinced her she wanted to be a writer. After a few short stories, she wrote her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1966. This was followed by a “malevolent fairy tale,” The Magic Toyshop. These were surreal gothic/horror tales written in a baroque and arcane “style of luxuriant beauty.” Reading Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard added science fiction to her palette, resulting in Heroes and Villains, a “post-apocalyptic fairy tale.” Gordon notes that The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, jam-packed with her social and feminist principles, showed how she could transform her “day-to-day experience into strange, hallucinatory art,” and he calls the controversial The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography “a work of brilliantly sustained cultural criticism.” Always the iconoclast, Carter had her supporters, like Salman Rushdie, Robert Coover, and director Neil Jordan. Gordon’s narrative has a beautiful, effortless flow as he seamlessly moves back and forth from the life to the works.
Expansive and lavish, this outstanding biography does much to demythologize Carter, revealing her to be a singular writer of her time.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-062684-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
