Foreign correspondent Shirer, it can conventionally be said, had led a full, rich life—at least from the age of twenty-one when, as a "raw Iowa youth," late editor of the Coe College Cosmos, he landed a job on the fabled Paris Tribune, never to go home again. But his satisfaction comes across mainly as self-satisfaction, combined with relief at escaping American "bigotry and banality"; his experience of foreign places reduces to platitudes about the "history within every cathedral, church, palace, museum and gallery, and in every park, cemetery, square and street"; his account of the life he lived through is flat, his report of people and events more gossipy than revealing. And, sadly, his is mean-spirited: the uncomely are described with contempt, celebrities are trailed to their often-ignominious ends. One searches, indeed, for clues to Shirer's incontrovertible success. Resentment at early snubs? A childhood passion for war news, a penchant for soldiering? Or perhaps sheer aggressiveness: at nine or so he pummeled his "bitchy," "ugly old grandma" into submission, an incident he relates without embarrassment. "The secret of this business is to turn it out fast under pressure," said Chicago Trib correspondent Wales, the day before elevating him to the foreign staff of the home paper. The days on the Paris Trib of Thurber, Elliot Paul, and Eugene Jolas are not without interest, nor his coverage of Lindbergh's arrival in Paris (which won him the promotion); and the Vienna he later shared with John Gunther, Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, Dorothy Thompson and "Red" Lewis, Moura Budberg and H.G. Wells is a wonderment. But the affairs, sexual and otherwise, of a few remarkable personalities cannot redeem a long, cranky, clumsy book. At the close he's off to Gandhi's India and what may be a more inspiring volume two.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1976
ISBN: 0316787124
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976
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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