Entertaining but too short on facts to deliver on its promise.
An attempt to fill a gap in an otherwise thoroughly examined life.
Hectored by his wife, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, into going to Europe in 1944, Ernest Hemingway flew to London to cover the war for Collier's magazine. He was in his mid-40s, internationally famous for his fiction, and had no enthusiasm for journalism; he intended to write just enough to remain employed while salting away material for future novels. During his 10 months in Europe, Hemingway rode a landing craft to Omaha Beach on D-Day (and then rode it back to the troopship), assembled a private army of partisans in France, and accompanied an infantry regiment when it was cut to pieces in the Hürtgenwald. His physical courage and enthusiasm for combat are beyond question. But while Hemingway's bibulous exploits in London and Paris are well-documented, exactly what he did in the field remains shrouded in mystery, and Mort (Thieves' Road: The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer's Path to Little Bighorn, 2015, etc.) cannot lift the veil. Parties, dinners, and marital strife aside, Hemingway is missing from much of the book, which is padded with elaborate detail on topics ranging from French political factions to tactics for fighting in Norman hedgerows. When Hemingway appears, a gauzy curtain falls. Regarding his ride on the landing craft, "the details…are a little sketchy." The author presents him amongst his guerrillas but describes none of their activities besides their march into Paris to liberate the Ritz Hotel’s cellar, about which "there's something of a mystery." Even in the Hürtgenwald, Hemingway appears briefly in two firefights and otherwise fades into the background of the larger narrative. Mort rejects the claim that Hemingway was just "a tourist in a helmet," but unlike the frontline soldiers he so admired, he could leave the front any time he wanted and often did.
Entertaining but too short on facts to deliver on its promise.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-247-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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