Elegant and meticulous, this authorized biography of the author of such literary works as The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet is a belletristic treat. If this biography existed in isolation, it would be a formidable achievement. Its fluidity and richness of detail echoes Durrell’s work at its best. But MacNiven (Literary Lifelines, 1981) is up against last year’s landmark Durrell biography, Into the Dark Labyrinth, by Gordon Bowker. It’s a fair fight, and in the ideal world both books should be read since they cover substantially different ground. Though MacNiven has the advantage of being able to quote freely from Durrell’s oeuvre, he is much better on his subject’s life, while Bowker’s real strength lies in his understanding and exposition of Durrell’s work. These two biographies make a compelling case for his protean talents, the timelessness of his art—but they probably aren’t enough to hold the ebbing tide of his popularity. Durrell was a child of the Raj, and MacNiven convincingly argues that India, in one form or another, inflected much of Durrell’s writing. Sent away to England—the despised “Pudding Island”—for schooling, he quickly proved an indifferent student. Unable to get into university, he set out for Corfu, intent on becoming a writer. This was the start of a peripatetic life that seemed to fuel his work. Each move, to various Greek islands, to wartime Alexandria, to the south of France, brought with it a cascade of poems and at least one novel. Unlike so many expatriate writers whose work remains ineluctably homebound, Durrell was truly a poet of places. In MacNiven, he has found a gifted, sympathetic interpreter. (36 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 21, 1998
ISBN: 0-571-17248-2
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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