Moving and honest, if a trifle claustrophobic: Mehta’s scrupulous attention to detail makes his account astonishing vivid...
Four Girls and a Doctor: Mehta offers his recollections of the mostly unhappy love affairs that preoccupied his early years in New York, and of the psychoanalyst who helped him get over them.
As a memoirist, Mehta (A Ved Mehta Reader, 1998, etc.) has made a career out of the rather extraordinary circumstances of his childhood and education. The son of a cultured and well-connected physician, Mehta grew up in India and nearly died of meningitis when he was four. Although he recovered, the raging fever brought on by the disease left him permanently blind. Since there were no schools for the blind in India at the time, Mehta was given an informal education at home by his father, and in 1949 (at 15), he traveled by himself to America and enrolled in a school for the blind in Little Rock, Arkansas. He later studied at Oxford and did graduate work at Harvard. This volume describes his early years in New York during the 1960s, when he was working as a staff writer at the New Yorker and beginning to establish his reputation as an essayist and journalist of renown. Most of the author’s recollections here, however, are of the various women he fell in love with during that time. Some of the affairs (with the dancer Gigi, for instance) were uncomplicated and relatively harmless, but others (such as his long romance with a poet and graduate student named Kilty, whom he nearly married) failed spectacularly and left the author in deep depressions that took years of therapy to undo. The last section of the account depicts Mehta’s dealing with one Dr. Bak, a Hungarian psychoanalyst who helped him sort out his feelings towards his lovers and himself.
Moving and honest, if a trifle claustrophobic: Mehta’s scrupulous attention to detail makes his account astonishing vivid and real, although many of the particular details (e.g., the prostate treatments he underwent to overcome his supposed impotence) are a tad more informative than necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-321-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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