This is more entertaining than lunch with a power editor at the Four Seasons Grill—full of delicious gossip plus a lesson or two in book publishing. Korda, of course, is a power editor (editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster) as well as a best-selling author (Man to Man, 1996; Charmed Lives: A Memoir, 1979; etc.). He’s also a world-class raconteur with apparently total recall. In this memoir, which skims quickly over his career at Oxford and his experiences in the RAF and in the Hungarian Revolution, he alternates snapshots of authors, editors, and publishers he has known with exploration of the growth and changes in book publishing since he began at Pocket Books (a division of Simon & Schuster) in 1958. As he moved up in the hierarchy to edit and buy books for S&S, he took on Will and Ariel Durant, Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins, and Robert Moses. He became friends with legendary agent Irving Lazar, who called every day with a new book or proposal—invaluable to a young editor—and with Dick Snyder, just starting out on the publishing side of S&S and who was later to take it to a multi-billion dollar business. Korda also began working with authors like Jacqueline Susann, Carlos Castaneda (“I have never doubted for a moment the truth of his stories about Don Juan”), Larry McMurtry (drawn to Korda because they shared an interest in rodeos), Joan Crawford, Graham Greene (an old family friend), Tennessee Williams (who literally drank himself under the table), Jesse Jackson (who never did produce a book), and Claus von BÅlow (ditto). Korda both roasts and toasts most of these notables, embroidering tales of their not always endearing eccentricities and at the same time applauding their talents. Neither modest or boastful about his own considerable abilities, Korda offers relatively few glimpses into his private life: long hours at work broke up his first marriage; his second wife is fond of horses and pigs. Deft, amusing, informative—just what the editor might hope for from one of his own authors. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-45659-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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