by Harold Brodkey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1996
With remarkable grace and stunning bravery, Brodkey (The Runaway Soul, 1991, etc.) chronicles his own harrowing slide into illness and death. At first glance it seems an obvious—and cruel—irony that recording the ``passage into nonexistence'' should fall to a writer whose lifework was so vibrantly obsessed with chronicling the self. Yet it's difficult to imagine a writer better equipped to accomplish that grim task than Brodkey, whose restless intellect and elegant, precise language bestowed an almost physical beauty on the abstraction of human consciousness. From the time he was diagnosed with AIDS, while editing his novel Profane Friendship in the spring of 1993, until his death earlier this year, continuing to write—to convey order on formlessness—seems to have been not only an anodyne but a constant, sustaining desire for Brodkey. This book, portions of which appeared in the New Yorker, is many things: a journal that catalogs the daily indignities (the countless pills, the loss of strength and independence, the vagaries of public perception) attendant on AIDS; a memoir poignant with self-doubt and regret; a calm meditation on (and preparation for) death. For all his prickly combativeness and wounded vanity, Brodkey doesn't rage at the dying of the light. He saves his greatest bitterness and vituperation not for death, but for certain elements of New York life, especially for the city's ``literary empire-builders and . . . masters of fakery.'' Yet throughout his illness he remains devoted to the city, to his wife, Ellen Schwamm, whose ministrations and love are of immense importance and comfort to him, and ultimately to himself and his work. ``If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease,'' he declares near the end, ``I wouldn't do it.'' Deeply affecting—a haunted, haunting work that penetrates with starling directness to the very core of the human mysteries: how to live, how to die. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-4831-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
Share your opinion of this book
More by Harold Brodkey
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.