The third and final volume of Graves’s life of his uncle (begun with Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1986) completes the full, febrile metamorphosis of Robert Graves into a romantic, “muse-inspired” poet. This volume opens just after the tumultuous collapse of Graves’s stormy 14-year relationship with the American poet Laura Riding. Although Riding had guided and inspired some of Graves’s best work—including his WWI autobiography, Goodbye to All That, and his historical novel, I Claudius’she now scorned him and his work bitterly. Since Graves had always worked best when in love, it wasn—t long before he tried to salve his wounds with another young woman—the long- suffering Beryl Hodge. Although it would be almost another decade before Graves divorced his first wife, Nancy, he and Beryl soon settled down to domestic life. During the war, between minor novels, criticism, and scattered poetry, Graves wrote The White Goddess. This long, fiendishly involuted descant on the poet’s wells of inspiration, full of gnomic musings on trees and goddesses, managed to create for Graves a cult following that lingers to this day. After the war, on his beloved Majorca, Graves acted out his theories by ignoring Beryl and falling in love with a succession of beautiful young women, imbuing these —muses— with the mystical, hortatory powers of the Great White Goddess. These muses usually repaid his obsessive attention with distance and spite, spurring him on to even greater poetic effusions. The wonder of it is that from these silly, self-involved infatuations came some of the best love poetry of the late 20th century. If this biography has any flaws, they are its stupefying length and perhaps its overly narrow focus: The spotlight on Graves is so bright that it’s sometimes difficult to fully appreciate the important supporting players. But these are quibbles. Richard Graves has created a monument to a monument.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-75380-116-7
Page Count: 618
Publisher: Collins & Brown/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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