A funny, informed, daringly constructed literary biography.
An ingenious dual biography of a classic American author and an unlikely literary muse.
The romance between novelist Nathanael West (1903–1940) and Eileen McKenney (1914–1940) was tragically brief. They met in October 1939, married six months later and died in a car accident shortly before Christmas 1940. Consequently, only a fraction of the latest biography by Meade (Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties, 2004, etc.) covers the life the two shared together. However, the book shows that they were often kindred spirits, and the author offers a glimpse of how literary life functioned on the East and West Coasts in the ’20s and ’30s. The son of an upper-middle-class Manhattan family, West grew up as a ne’er-do-well who entered Brown University by essentially committing identity theft. Battling his own lassitude and a pervasive anti-Semitism—he eventually changed his name from Nathan Weinstein—he found time in New York to produce a handful of comic novels, including the acclaimed Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). He struck his fortune in Hollywood, though, getting to know the many writers who headed to California to make a quick buck from the studios—a culture West skewered in his final novel, The Day of the Locust (1939). McKenney wasn’t an author, but she was embraced by New York’s literati thanks to her sister, Ruth, whose series of embellished humor pieces about Eileen ran in the New Yorker. For all their notoriety, each harbored deep anxieties that helped connect them. West questioned his talents and bemoaned his poor sales, while McKenney was a product of a broken home who raised her son alone after divorcing her alcoholic husband. Meade doesn’t labor to suggest that the pairing was kismet, nor does she aggressively foreshadow the accident that cut short her subject’s lives. Instead, she foregrounds their intelligence, humor and luck—both dodged the worst of the Great Depression—and creates a substantive tale about finding the good life in tough times.
A funny, informed, daringly constructed literary biography.Pub Date: March 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-15-101149-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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IN THE NEWS
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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