As the finality of the title indicates, Simone de Beauvoir considers this the last volume of her autobiography, a summing-up. At the outset she promises to consider in terms of its "themes" a life which in the previous four volumes (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, A Very Easy Death) she has related more in terms of its events. It is a promise she never fulfills. This book is a pleasant but somehow centerless compendium of odds and ends from the ten years since the publication of Force of Circumstance — new and continued friendships, deaths, dreams, fond gossip, books read, films and plays seen, works written (here explained and defended against critics), travels touristic and political, feminist and socialist ideas — prefaced by a more forceful but still unevenly interesting essay on the provocative question, "Why am I myself?". Her meditations on this subject consist of brief recapitulations of the stages of her life from the perspective of Sartrean psychology (the conflict between one's sense of subject and one's treatment by others as an object) and of the related question of free will: to what extent is a human being formed by circumstance — parents, social class, friendships, schooling — and to what extent did Beauvoir shape herself?. She traces with satisfaction the persistence from her youngest years of a stubborn will and an "eagerness for knowledge" that have guided her through circumstance; but she never really comes to terms with the question. There are flashes of intensity and wonder — especially in Beauvoir's account of her relationship with a young woman who is obviously an intellectual adopted daughter, perhaps because Sylvie gives Beauvoir the grasp of the future which old age by her own testimony lacks, and without which she has, alas, loosened her grip on the present.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1974
ISBN: 1569249814
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1974
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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