Believing that Bernard Crick's authorized biography, George Orwell (1981), neglected the writer's inner life, Shelden (Friends of Promise, 1989) set out to discover the secret life that would help to elucidate Animal Farm and 1984. What he offers here is a biography of an eccentric, decent, sickly man, intensely private and self-deprecating, who believed that his life had nothing to do with his writing or that his life was his writing. Orwell (1903-50), born Eric Blair, educated at Eton, spent five years in Burma before becoming a ``tramp,'' an experience he described in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). He worked as a tutor, a bookshop clerk, a grocer, a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and a BBC commentator and journalist, but mostly as a writer who turned out reams of personal and literary essays and, to avoid libel, disguised his political commentary in fiction such as Animal Farm. Prematurely aged from the London Blitz, repeated bouts with TB, and the loss of his wife, he moved to the isolated Scottish island of Jura with his sister and his adopted infant son; there, he completed 1984. Orwell died in a London hospital three months after a bedside marriage to his second wife, ending a life spent mostly away from the high-living, hard-drinking writers of his generation: ``I cannot honestly say that I have done anything except write books and raise hens and vegetables,'' he wrote, taking ``pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.'' Despite his aim, then, Shelden may have proved that Orwell had no secret life, that the only pitiful thing about him was his failure to inspire love in women, that the only scandalous one was his collection of crudely captioned seaside postcards depicting voluptuous women—an expression of what Orwell called the ``unofficial self'' everyone has. Occasional glimpses of that unofficial self are, disappointingly, all that Shelden offers. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016709-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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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