Does little to rehabilitate Buck’s literary reputation, but respectfully resets her life and work in its appropriate...
A biographical consideration of Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), an author few take seriously today.
Conventional wisdom dictates that Buck—whose bestselling novel The Good Earth (1931) captured the difficulties of life among poor farmers in rural China—is at best an important footnote in 20th-century American literature. Whatever accolades that novel earned her (including the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes), many critics agree that she squandered her talents in her late career on thin, sentimental books. Spurling (Matisse the Master, 2005, etc.) doesn’t deny her subject’s serious shortcomings as a writer, but she adds valuable perspective by explaining the complicated circumstances of her rise to literary stardom. The daughter of American missionaries, Buck (nee Sydenstricker) spent the bulk of her childhood in parts of China characterized by hard living. The people her parents were hoping, and usually failing, to convert were subsistence farmers whose livelihoods were routinely unsettled by abusive rival warlords. Pearl’s father was hard-headed and often absent, and her mother was often ill. The young girl took refuge in authors like Charles Dickens, though Western novels were poor preparation for the culture shock she experienced when she moved to the United States to attend college. Buck channeled her frustration with Westerners’ misunderstandings about China into essays, stories and ultimately The Good Earth; in doing so, she had the support of her first husband, John Lossing Buck, a scholar on Chinese agriculture. Those writings earned her a place as a leading American spokesperson on the Chinese people, correcting numerous racist misconceptions. But Communist China eventually rejected Buck’s efforts, and Spurling somberly depicts the novelist as a woman without a country. After her success, she wrote mostly to provide financial support to her daughter, who was afflicted with phenylketonuria. Buck’s marriage eventually failed and her writings grew increasingly irrelevant, but Spurling speeds through this decline, emphasizing her high points as a leading novelist and advocate for China’s everyday citizens.
Does little to rehabilitate Buck’s literary reputation, but respectfully resets her life and work in its appropriate contexts.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4042-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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