A dogged biographer elicits from Didion’s life much more than tidy observations of “morality and culture.”
An eloquent work on the life of Joan Didion (b. 1934), fashioning her story as no less than the rupture of the American narrative.
Didion’s works of fiction, nonfiction, and journalism relentlessly probed the times in which they emerged. In this wonderfully engaging biography, Daugherty (English and Creative Writing/Oregon State Univ.; Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, 2011, etc.) wisely sticks to Didion’s near obsession with making sense of an increasingly incoherent narrative during the tumultuous decades of the waning 20th century. Showing the “construction of persona” of the California-raised author, Daugherty examines Didion’s exploration of the concept of the Western-moving pioneer, resilient and stoical in the face of any calamity, a trope underscored by her mother’s somewhat depressed motto, “what difference does it make?” The author also discusses Didion’s journal keeping, which fed her penchant for eavesdropping; her early stylistic training under Berkeley instructor Mark Schorer and his “channeling of [Joseph] Conrad; her “frailty” and devotion to being the outsider; and her maddening “elisions,” first honed from reading Hemingway. Didion’s early pieces of New Journalism for Vogue—where she spent her early formative years, until the mid 1960s—reveal the “helter skelter” process that shaped her work: the contingency and chance, rather than the deliberation that critics assumed. In book reviews, movie-star profiles, and political reporting, she was struggling to find an “effective American voice.” Enter Time writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she married after the publication of her first novel, Run, River, in 1963, and with whom she moved back to California to work in the more lucrative industry of TV and film. Daugherty devotes much of the later pages of his biography to their remarkable literary partnership, which ended with his sudden death in 2003—an event that inspired her haunting memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2003).
A dogged biographer elicits from Didion’s life much more than tidy observations of “morality and culture.”Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-01002-5
Page Count: 688
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PROFILES
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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