In this fourth and final volume of his autobiography (Love in America, 1994, etc.) Green, American expatriate and member of the AcadÇmie Franáaise, recalls with customary candor the years in which he not only became a writer but wrestled with the homosexuality that threatened his equally vital spiritual needs as a devout Catholic. Published first in France in the mid-1960s, this volume picks up with Green's return to his family in Paris after three years at the University of Virginia, a seminal time in his long life. For there he not only enjoyed romantic friendships with other men and fell passionately in love, but also met the family of his beloved southern mother. Back in Paris he took long walks, read widely, and attended Mass daily. While his remarkably tolerant father did not pressure him to find work, Green was aware that he should find something. Writing turned out to be his true mÇtier, and by the end of the volume he's part of the literary crowd surrounding Jean Cocteau and AndrÇ Gide, has published three novels, and has won the 1929 Harper and Book of the Month prize for his novel Adrienne Mesurat. But while from then on literature would be the absorbing work of his life, his struggle to overcome his intense attraction to male physical beauty equally dominated those years. Though convinced that being pure in both body and soul was essential, Green could not refrain from furtive, anonymous one-night stands or falling in love with handsome young men. By 1929 he was a successful writer but of ``the war between the body and the soul . . . had everything still to learn.'' A fitting conclusion to one man's scrupulously accounted-for journey of self-discovery that, like the best of confessional literature, transcends the individual to become universal.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-7145-3002-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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