Herriot's many fans. (8 pages b&w photos)
A heartfelt account of the life of Alf Wight, veterinarian author of the bestselling James Herriot books, by his son.
The younger Wight, who worked alongside his father in theYorkshire practice familiar to millions through books, movies, and television, has created a loving, unsentimental portrait of his well-known father. He draws on the elder Wight’s letters to his parents and his wife, his unpublished writings and unwritten oral narratives, the recollections of friends and colleagues, and his own memories. Instead of turning Alf Wight's life story into a warm Herriot tale, his son acknowledges the health problems that plagued him at veterinary school and later cut short his time in the RAF, the deep depression he experienced in 1960, and the prostate cancer that took his life in 1995. But it is his working life, both as a veterinarian and as a writer, that the author focuses on, and the details here are rich. Particularly gratifying for Herriot's fans are the full-length sketches of the real-life counterparts of such fictional characters as Siegfried and Tristan Farnon—Donald and Brian Sinclair—and their long relationship with the famous author. Wight complicates such relationships still further by introducing the actors and actresses who portrayed Herriot, his wife, and his colorful colleagues in the movie and television versions. (At one point Donald Sinclair, unhappy over his portrayal as Siegfried in the film, threatened a lawsuit, but friendship prevailed.) Yorkshire farmers are here too, although Wight makes clear that the way of life Herriot depicted so well has now vanished. Wight also reveals, using excerpts from an early unpublished novel and from later published stories, how long and hard his father worked at becoming a writer. A thoroughly satisfying biography—believable, entertaining, and filled with engaging characters. Sure to be relished by
Herriot's many fans. (8 pages b&w photos)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-345-42151-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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