Strong, wonderfully absorbing life of Beat bard Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926) that breaks new ground in its critical analyses of the poet's work; by Schumacher (Reasons to Believe, 1988—not reviewed). Readers might think that after Barry Miles's massive and masterful Ginsberg (1989), an equally massive biography coming so closely behind is more than one has the stamina for—but no. Schumacher goes over the same events in Ginsberg's life as Miles did, and does so with an intelligence that bonds us to the emotionally battered poet. Unlike Miles, he cuts off his biography in 1980: The bulk of Ginsberg's major works had appeared by then (one should have 1985's Collected Poems at hand to follow the critical argument). Also, unlike Miles, Schumacher uses few interviews, hoping to avoid mythologizing by going to original sources contemporary with the events described—largely collected archives of Ginsbergiana and Ginsberg's voluminous letters and journals kept from childhood, which form a vivid autobiography of events as they happened. Ginsberg's genie sprang from the marriage of his poet father and mad mother—a wildly outspoken radical—and was unstoppered by Blake, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Jack Kerouac's spontaneous bop prosody. The young poet found his voice in ``Howl''—and what a voice it was. Schumacher takes us through the poem's drafts until it was shaped and given its final verbal lift and meticulously forceful imitation of spontaneity. One is struck time and again by Ginsberg's originality and the richly surreal syntax that opens doors to his most private experience. His Buddhism, raids on the political establishment, and Beat friends Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, et al. get full treatment, as do his gay love affairs, especially with mainly heterosexual Peter Orlovsky. Ginsberg's bottomless aid to the bedeviled, learned in childhood, is stunning. Rings the doorbell on your heart, your brain, and your love of great verse. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-08179-0
Page Count: 752
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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