An intriguing look at a particularly influential life of letters and a treat for Mailer fans.
The late literary lion’s archivist shares 70 years of his missives.
Before he died at age 84, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Norman Mailer (1923-2007) penned 44 books. He also spent that time adapting plays, writing poetry, producing films, and helping to launch “New Journalism” and the Village Voice. In the course of all that activity, the Brooklyn boy–turned–Harvard man also wrote complex, caustic and sometimes-moving letters to some 4,000 individuals. Lennon (Norman Mailer: A Double Life, 2013) presents 716 of those letters, decade by decade, in their naked forms and without much introduction. The recipients represent a cavalcade of contrasting personalities ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to Monica Lewinsky. Most are directed at Mailer’s family, friends and colleagues and find the World War II veteran supremely absorbed in his own ideas. Mailer aficionados will no doubt enjoy the behind-the-scenes looks at the making of seminal works like The Naked and the Dead, as well as the writer’s ongoing sparring matches with editors and critics. Back in 1958, fellow scribe William Styron received this warning: “So I tell you this, Bill-boy. You have got to learn to keep your mouth shut about my wife, for if you do not, and I hear of it again, I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.” The legendary man of letters seems downright tame here, possessed of a certain kind of blue-collar charm that compliments his penchant for intellectualization. But one must also then consider that Mailer later stabbed the same woman he so steadfastly defended. She survived, but the author would go on to fulfill the prediction he made early on in life about becoming a serial groom. Apparently, Mailer hated writing letters and often found the exercise tortuous, but from Lennon’s collection, it appears that he loathed being disconnected even more.
An intriguing look at a particularly influential life of letters and a treat for Mailer fans.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6623-0
Page Count: 860
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
