The fourth volume of Merton's correspondence, complementing The Hidden Ground of Love, 1985 (letters on religion and society), The Road to Joy, 1989 (letters to friends), and The School of Charity, 1990 (letters on monastic spirituality). It's now apparent that Merton, already celebrated as an autobiographer and Christian contemplative, was also one of the great American letter-writers of the century. His range is as vast as his adopted nation (he was born in France): God, jazz, civil rights, atomic weaponry, obedience, rebellion, etc. Ably edited by Bochen (Religious Studies/Nazareth College of Rochester), this collection consists of letters to other writers; the contents all postdate Merton's bestselling literary debut, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). The first epistles, in fact, are addressed to Evelyn Waugh, who was assigned the task of trimming Mountain for British publication. Here, Merton is the eager apprentice at the mentor's feet (``I need criticism the way a man dying of thirst needs water''), but not above passing on clever ideas for novels or urging Waugh to recite the rosary. Next comes a compilation of letters to three Christian writers: Jacques Maritain, with whom Merton discusses the joys of the hermit life; Czeslaw Milosz, who questions the value of political action; and Boris Pasternak, to whom Merton reveals some dreams. A flurry of letters to Latin American writers, most of them obscure—Ernesto Cardenal, once a novice monk under Merton's guidance, is a notable exception— invites glossing-over. The great grab bag comes last: missives to American correspondents like James Baldwin, Walker Percy, William Carlos Williams, and Henry Miller (the two balding guys chuckle over their physical likeness). Less jocular than The Road to Joy, less profound than The School of Charity—but, for all that, a well-rounded monument to a well-rounded man.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-13055-8
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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
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