Sympathetic and circumstantial—a readable literary biography that is likely to be the last word on the subject.
A lucid, thoughtfully told look at the life of the American journalist and novelist John Hersey (1914-1993), famed for the long New Yorker story that would become the 1946 book Hiroshima.
Former Times Literary Supplement editor Treglown (Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936, 2013, etc.), based in London, has written biographies of V.S. Pritchett, Henry Green, and Roald Dahl. In his latest, he focuses on the novelist and journalist of considerable skill and wide interests who would never attract the readership of his reputation-defining book Hiroshima, of which Treglown writes, “no other book by Hersey is as famous or as difficult to write about.” It is difficult to write about not only because it seemed natural and sometimes self-referential, but also because it had an odd context, officially approved by the American occupation government of Japan but written by “a war poet as much as a journalist.” Hersey’s literate and often lyrical approach to reporting had been tested at places like Guadalcanal; his reporting influenced Norman Mailer’s later novel The Naked and the Dead. After the war, he cast about widely for subjects, writing of Harry Truman, the internment of Japanese-American citizens, and other matters, all the while remaining committed to what one eulogist, poet James Merrill, called “the older, Platonic virtues—Prudence, Temperance, Justice.” Treglown’s title is fitting; there was no dissembling in this son of missionaries. He was brilliant yet outwardly modest—and, as Treglown writes of the much-liked Yale student, “walking humbly can’t have been the easiest response for so gifted and popular a young man.” By writing of the course of Hersey’s long career, Treglown helps broaden his reputation beyond Hiroshima while recognizing that that classic work is the one for which the writer will remain known.
Sympathetic and circumstantial—a readable literary biography that is likely to be the last word on the subject.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-28026-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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