Still, this is certainly the biography against which to measure the lurid claims and devout counterclaims prompted by the...
Sutin (Divine Invasions, 1989) paints a rich narrative of the eccentric visionary Aleister Crowley’s life, which now seems somewhat ho-hum as for his sexual escapades—the source of much of his bad press—but all the more vile for his egomania and fascist tendencies.
He was called the wickedest man on earth; he also adorned the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album: Aleister Crowley was an expert on the art of high magic, the white variety (which has nothing to do with purity and everything to do with “the most sublime privilege of man”): “By development of will-power, by rigorous self-control, by solitude, meditation and prayer, a man may be granted the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel.” The author’s intent is to get beyond the exotic image. This he does mostly by putting Crowley’s human face on display: the mountaineer, the family man, the serious investigator of the astral plane. Yet ever-present are Crowley’s ugly maneuverings in the magic community, his pleasure at Hitler’s supposed use of his work, and his abuse of friends. Crowley’s sexual acrobatics no longer shock, and they are unconvincing as a sacramental ritual. Sutin is a very clean writer, which makes a difference considering the level of detail on parade (“From March 23 to April 7, Crowley endured a fallow period”), but he fails to convey any sense of Crowley’s mystical notions or experiences. When he relates that “In the Tenth Aethyr, Crowley would confront the Dispersion of the Abyss,” it might as well be liner notes for a PlayStation game, and when a character whispers “Chaos is my name, and thick darkness,” the reader gets no chill.
Still, this is certainly the biography against which to measure the lurid claims and devout counterclaims prompted by the Crowley legend. (photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25243-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
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