A personality-driven, authoritative, sometimes circuitous work.
Three loosely connected essays by Threepenny Review founder and author Lesser (The Pagoda in the Garden, 2005) explore her concern with the connection between art and experience.
A recent trip to Berlin, Germany, informs these three reflections by Lesser, a self-described atheist and secular Jew who never expected in her lifetime to set foot in Germany. As a fellow in 2003 at the American Academy in Berlin, Lesser overcame her aversion to things German and writes in the first essay, “Out of Berlin,” of her recognition of how deeply Jewish the city still is, especially in terms of its passion for art and culture. The rigorous self-examination undergone by Germans since World War II suggests “a nation of people who are very much alive to their own capacity for unforgivable behavior.” And this darkness attracts Lesser, who, at 51, is at the “Mittelweg” of her life and prone to feelings of regret, as she delineates more fully in the last essay, “Difficult Friends,” about the recent death by cancer of her dear friend, writer Leonard Michaels. Sharing with Lenny, as she calls him, a quick temper and little moderation for passions, she quarreled often with him during the years of their long friendship over issues of loyalty. In the end, his death robbed her of a sizable part of her intellectual life at Berkeley, where she lives. The middle essay, however, is the most toothsome, examining her failure to write her intended book about Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose work she first encountered at Cambridge 25 years ago. A kindred figure and fellow atheist until the end, Hume strikes her as “someone to be carried through life as a sort of talisman against non-sense.” Although she shares his literary bent and admires his personal benevolence toward others, his class snobbery dooms him.
A personality-driven, authoritative, sometimes circuitous work.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-42400-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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