A lovely yet overstretched article or essay topic; there’s earnest enthusiasm aplenty but not enough else to support a full...
A beloved author waxes poetic on an unlikely muse: the poet W.H. Auden.
Poetry probably isn’t the first word to come to mind when thinking about McCall Smith’s work. A lawyer by training (and the author of Botswana’s only published legal text), he is best known for his wildly popular commercial mystery series, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. However, as he reveals in this slim, category-defying volume, Auden has had a profound impact not only on McCall Smith’s work, but his life as a whole. His succinct ode to the celebrated British poet is not a memoir, though he includes a few moments from his own life—e.g., how he discovered Auden as a student in Belfast and how he began to understand him reading Bucolics on the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. Nor is the book a biography, though there are some charming details about Auden’s life as well—one particular story about his atrocious housekeeping skills is impossible to forget. McCall Smith is adamant that the book should not be read as criticism, as Auden’s body of work has been analyzed in detail by countless literary scholars, though he spends much of the text taking readers (rather haphazardly) through some of the major themes of Auden’s poetry. If anything, though, the book could best be called an argument for Auden, a defense of his work, and a simple case for people to continue to pay attention to this particular writer. As McCall Smith writes early on, “I believe that reading the work of W.H. Auden may make a difference to one’s life.”
A lovely yet overstretched article or essay topic; there’s earnest enthusiasm aplenty but not enough else to support a full book.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-691-14473-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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