John’s honesty is bracing as he tries hard for understanding and acceptance, but the Hemingway legacy remains as complicated...
Desperately sad memoir by Ernest Hemingway’s grandson chronicles a wretched family history of turbulent father-son relationships exacerbated by chronic, hereditary mental illness.
The author’s father, Gregory Hemingway, was Ernest’s son by second wife Pauline. Ignored and abandoned as a boy by his glamorous parents, Greg grew up hating his mother and idealizing his famous father. He was afflicted with the same bipolar disorder that led Papa and grandfather Clarence to commit suicide in late middle age. Moreover, Greg was a transvestite, frequently arrested for cross-dressing; he eventually underwent a sex-change operation. Born in 1960, the author also had to deal with a schizophrenic mother who was often hospitalized, leaving him and his siblings to be shifted among relatives. John writes in a surprisingly evenhanded fashion about these traumatic events, as well as Greg’s mental degeneration as he moved from one wife/caretaker to another, much as Ernest did. The author reproduced family patterns, too: Financially dependent on his father’s handouts, he wheedled to get what he wanted, just as Greg did with Ernest. “I would like to see you straighten up and fly right,” Ernest exhorts his son in one of the explosive letters printed here to trace their fraught bond. Greg was deeply ambivalent about his identity, and John argues that perhaps Ernest was as well. He enlists Papa’s work to back him up, and to cast a more forgiving light on Greg’s troubled behavior. He couldn’t be a writer, he realized, until he made peace with his father. In the book’s moving afterword, the author promises to his own newborn son that “this time it’d be different.”
John’s honesty is bracing as he tries hard for understanding and acceptance, but the Hemingway legacy remains as complicated as ever.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59921-112-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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.
