All in all, a fine addition to American literary scholarship.
Letters illuminating the lives of the great African-American poet and his forgotten literary champion.
Hughes had published only in a few newspapers and literary journals when, at a Harlem party in 1924, he met the flamboyant arts critic Van Vechten—who, though born into a well-heeled white Midwestern family, sometimes thought of himself as “colored” and in any event labored vigorously to publicize the African-American writers, artists, and musicians who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. He introduced Hughes’s work to Alfred Knopf, who brought out The Weary Blues in 1925; by way of returning the favor, Hughes gingerly defended Van Vechten’s novel Nigger Heaven (which made liberal use of a word forbidden to whites then as now). Their friendship blossomed, and Van Vechten continued to promote Hughes’s work—and to help Hughes in moments of financial crisis—even after Hughes became internationally famous and Van Vechten slid into obscurity. The letters, thoughtfully edited and annotated by Bernard (African-American Studies/Smith Coll.), are often unremarkable exchanges of cordiality and gossip between two men who obviously cared a great deal for one another; they are, however, highly useful as adjuncts to Hughes’s autobiography and other life studies, posted as they are from such far-flung places as Hollywood and Central Asia. Moreover, they abound in references to the work of contemporaries, such as Countee Cullen and Bessie Smith, so that the volume makes useful reading for students of African-American literature and culture generally. The collection brings recognition to Van Vechten’s many efforts to connect African-American artists to the New York establishment—efforts, Bernard notes, that have too long been overlooked.
All in all, a fine addition to American literary scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-45113-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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
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