Literary gossip, and catnip for book junkies.
A Canadian journalist who lived for a time at famed Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Co. tells the story of its iconoclastic owner and his destitute but mostly merry band of boarders.
Reporting on crime in Ottawa was getting Mercer down, so when he received what could have been a death threat one night from a disgruntled subject of one of his stories, the author was more than ready to leave his old life and flee to Paris. The City of Light was charming, and Mercer wasn't ready to leave when the money ran out, so he did what countless other writers had done before him: shacked up at the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, trading a little bit of service in the store for a bed (but not a bath—ablutions were performed at the spacious facilities of a nearby cafe). There Mercer got to know owner George Whitman and many of the characters who over the years drifted into the store and never left. Luckily for the literary freeloaders, Whitman (no relation to Walt) was a committed, lifelong communist, a man determined to put his ideals into action by sharing what he had—a roof—with the have-nots. Mercer, a fresh and eager face, quickly became the old man's confidante. He learned about Whitman's personal history, his goals for the store and the idiosyncratic methods of penny-pinching that allowed him to operate a free hostel for the well-read set. Mercer is a genial, wide-eyed guide to the wild crew at the store, and although he eventually became somewhat disillusioned with Whitman, his affection and admiration for what the man has accomplished are clear.
Literary gossip, and catnip for book junkies.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-34739-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
