An erudite lesson in embracing aloneness.
A memoir of the author’s life and a study of solitude in highbrow modern culture.
Like Thoreau and many other creatives before him, Harper’s contributor Johnson (English/Univ. of Arizona and Spalding Univ.; Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays, 2017, etc.) would prefer to be alone. “To use the term favored by the Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton,” he suggests the socially uninclined be referred to as “solitaries,” and he strives to reframe their stories (and his own) under society’s critical eye. “Solitude and silence are positive gestures,” he writes in defense of those in the world who would prefer to live alone and aim “for the cultivation of an interior life.” While reminiscing on his own past, Johnson explores notions of solitude as seen in the writings of a pantheon of exalted literary and creative figures. Poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, along with reflections on the lives of Paul Cézanne, Nina Simone, and fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, help shape this unconventional lifestyle into a “personal, particular spiritual philosophy” that will be recognizable to even the most skeptical of readers. “In the silence of my solitary walks I hear the voices of the trees. I hear them singing of a solitude that admits no loneliness,” writes the author, seamlessly integrating a wealth of source material from his diverse and multifaceted cast of saintly solitaries. Beneath his scholarly efforts (and the occasional curmudgeonly aside), a tender memoir appears in pieces, delicately woven into his artists’ profiles. A monastic, transcendent visit to Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence suggests that particular emotional experiences can only emerge during an independent sojourn. Memories of Johnson’s childhood and parents as well as stories of friends and old lovers surface during bouts of quiet research, growing from well-chosen poems, letters, and interviews into rhapsodic recollections of a profoundly full life.
An erudite lesson in embracing aloneness.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-60829-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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