Occasionally uneven but a pleasure for Perry’s loyal fans and a book that is likely to win her some new ones as well.
Literary biographer Drayton (Design/Unitec Institute of Technology; Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, 2008, etc.) turns her attention to novelist Anne Perry (b. 1938) and the past she couldn’t keep hidden.
The author begins at a pivotal moment in Perry’s life: the phone call from a journalist to her agent offering the theory—about to be printed—that Perry was actually Juliet Hulme, perpetrator of a famous New Zealand murder. When that theory turned out to be fact, the lives of Perry and all those connected to her were turned upside down. Perry, her agents and her publicist have always argued that the murder is in the past, and Perry, who committed the crime as a teenager, and her family should be allowed to leave it there. While it is difficult not to feel for Perry, it is equally difficult to ignore the fact that the argument holds sway over this biography as well. Drayton creates a conundrum in which she has made Perry’s unveiling as Hulme the center of the book but also believes it deserves less attention than it’s been given. However, the author ably plumbs the Hulme story for how it has shaped Perry’s crime fiction and provides other insights into Perry’s writing style and process. The author includes detailed background on Perry’s unpublished attempts, as well as the origins and development of many of her best-selling books. Though they interrupt the narrative flow, descriptions of each of Perry’s novels will trigger interest for those unfamiliar with her work. Drayton tells a beguiling story of an author’s climb to the best-seller lists and how a secret she would rather keep hidden was publicly made known.
Occasionally uneven but a pleasure for Perry’s loyal fans and a book that is likely to win her some new ones as well.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62872-324-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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