A pleasant amble in Bookland and a treat for the bookishly inclined, as well as for McMurtry buffs.
Having written about other aspects of his life, novelist and screenwriter McMurtry (When the Light Goes, 2007, etc.) finally gets around to his bibliomania.
Just about the time his first novels were appearing in the 1960s, McMurtry was setting up shop as a book scout and dealer, working thrift shops and garage sales and other booksellers’ stock to make, by his account, a pretty decent living. That he had long since become a voracious reader was not something anyone might have predicted. As he writes, he grew up on a little ranch nearly 20 miles away from the nearest library, with parents who apparently did not reach much beyond cattle-trade journals. “It puzzles me how totally bookless our ranch house was,” he writes, though he did borrow the occasional cowboy book from a wealthy neighbor whose mansion McMurtry now owns and has filled with a library of—he tells us more than once—28,000 volumes. Rather frustratingly for his bibliophile readers, he doesn’t go into much detail about what that library contains, save a smallish collection of 20th-century pulps. (“I’m hanging on to them,” he writes, “against the day when I might want to write something Legmanesque about violence in American popular culture.”) Like all booksellers, McMurtry is rueful about the rare book that got away, which, he counsels, is about the best way to learn. Yet, since his own early catalogues are rarer than most, he is fairly content to keep at his trade, which, when he is not winning book prizes and Oscars, involves keeping up a “book village” on the English model, but located on the high plains of north Texas. Elsewhere he writes of bookish eccentrics (though, as he warns, this book is mostly “personality-free”), deals gone right and wrong, chain stores, the Internet and the decline of reading, sticking to his guns even as he cautions that “it didn’t take electricity long to kill off the kerosene lantern.”
A pleasant amble in Bookland and a treat for the bookishly inclined, as well as for McMurtry buffs.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8334-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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