A memoir of easy grace and lively intelligence, filled with striking portraits of individuals, a time, and a place.
Perceptive, engaging memoirs of a woman’s life shaped around the absence of certain men.
For novelist and memoirist Johnson (Minor Characters, 1983, etc.), the first man whose departure affected her life was her cultured grandfather, whose early suicide left his daughter with unrealized artistic longings. A stereotypical stage mother living through her child, she pushed Joyce to become an actress/dancer/composer. From her highly managed childhood, the author skips ahead to the early 1960s, when she was 26. (Presumably because Minor Characters covered Johnson’s romance with Jack Kerouac, those years are barely mentioned.) She had already lived with and been left by one painter, and was about to take up with another, James Johnson. Missing men figured in his life, too: he was a fatherless man who had left his own sons behind when he separated from their mother. The sad tale of James and Joyce’s love affair and brief marriage, which provided the basis for her novel In the Night Café (1989), is set in the lofts and bars of Greenwich Village, where money was scarce, art was abstract, and drinking was heavy. Within a year of his accidental death in 1963, she met and fell for another fatherless Abstract Expressionist, Peter Pinchbeck. Definitely not a family man, Pinchbeck married Johnson only after she became pregnant, assured by her that having a baby around would not change his life as an artist. In understated style she recounts her attempts to keep that promise by supporting herself, her son, and a husband whose paintings did not sell. After five years she left Pinchbeck, began reading feminist writers, found that living alone suited her, and discovered that she could write. Living apart but still married until he died in 2000, they were more than friends but less than lovers, linked by a son and a past but separated by unbridgeable differences.
A memoir of easy grace and lively intelligence, filled with striking portraits of individuals, a time, and a place.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03310-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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.
