May 4, 1991, was ``Eugenia Price Day'' on Georgia's St. Simons Island—a 75th birthday and general ``I-Love-You-E.P.'' celebration organized by the writer's friends and publishing company. The occasion so moved this author of 37 books (among them inspirational titles and historical series like the Savannah Quartet) that she paused while working on her follow-up to Bright Captivity (1991) to write this little thank-you note to all the people who made her what she is today—a very successful writer indeed, with hundreds of thousands of fans whom she thanks right along with Doubleday president Stephen Rubin and her agent, editor, sales reps, typist, and yardworker. Along the way, Price reveals some fascinating personal facts- -that she and her longtime companion, Joyce Blackburn, bought burial plots on St. Simons before they bought their house; that Price named her Buick LeSabre after the protagonist of the Savannah Quartet; and that she includes God (``Him'') while making publishing decisions with her agent. To Price aficionados, it will make sense that, as a reader, the author prefers biographies to fiction (since her own novels favor character over plot), though it may prove disappointing to hear how Price delegates research tasks. But, mostly, fans will hold this valentine to their bosoms, even though Price warns that establishment critics will find it ``schmaltzy, dripping with sentiment.'' Well, yes—not to mention a little too ingenuously good-willed. But there's a broader lesson here: Price has spent three decades listening to her own creative voice, never trying to be all things to all people—and so she has endured. (Twenty b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 19, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-42321-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
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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