This mid-life installment of Greene's authorized biography has all the thrills of the writer's ``entertainments'' and the emotional complexity of his serious works. Picking up from the sometimes overly exhaustive Volume One (1989), this work covers a watershed quarter-century in Greene's life and literary career (as well as in 20th-century history) with nary a dull page. Greene's personal life alone in this period—the breakdown of his marriage during the Blitz, his impassioned affair with a married American while unable to free himself of either his wife or his previous mistress—had more than enough grief for two of his best novels, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, which Sherry shows were anguished reflections of his inner life. Yet with all his interviews and access to Greene's papers, even this astute biographer finds his work more accessible than his personality (not even Greene's friends and lovers could claim full intimacy with him). This natural secrecy made Greene a perfect spy, and during WW II he worked for MI6, a division of the British Secret Intelligence Service, in West Africa and London under his lifelong friend, the Soviet double agent Kim Philby, who provided Sherry with many memories of Greene's espionage career (not always reliably, the author later determined). With the end of the war and his marriage, Greene worked for a while as a publisher and screenwriter (most notably of The Third Man), but a later love affair churned up his suicidal nature, which drew him to the Malayan Emergency, the Mau Mau rebellion, and the Indochinese war. Sherry is at his best retracing Greene's activities in Vietnam, recreating the wartime atmosphere and investigating the sources and inspirations for—as well as the distortions in—The Quiet American. Sherry's admirable work beats out even the writer's own memoirs as the definitive account of his life, although Greene remains a character impossible to penetrate satisfactorily. (51 b&w photos and 6 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-86056-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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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