Another ``interim report'' on the life (1893-1957) of the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and reluctant Christian apologist, by a longtime friend, completer of Sayers's translation of Dante and author of The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter with Dante (1989- -not reviewed). The problem all Sayers's biographers face is to reconcile her early career as a pioneer and leading theorist of the formal detective story with the religious plays, essays, and lectures to which she committed her last 15 years. In the absence of a collected edition of Sayers's letters, Reynolds still tries to make Sayers speak for herself whenever possible by quoting letters, conversations, and passages from her voluminous writings. The result is a view of the writer that Sayers herself would likely have approved of: as a generous, fiercely intelligent woman whose cardinal passion, her intellectual ardor, led her from Oxford to the hand-to-mouth London bohemianism that spawned the inimitably foppish Wimsey and then, quite logically, to a defense of the writer's imagination (The Mind of the Maker) that set forth Sayers's understanding of the Trinity. Despite some stiffness in the early chapters, and a disinclination to criticize her subject even mildly, Reynolds captures the ardent nature that sustained Sayers through her unrequited love affairs, her pregnancy without marriage, her lifelong support of the son she never publicly acknowledged, and the writing she felt certain from the beginning was her vocation. It isn't until the popular Wimsey books are behind, though, that Reynolds's matching passion comes out—she calls The Mind of the Maker and The Man Born to Be King Sayers's ``two greatest works''—and the biography comes into its own, even though only a few years of Sayers's life remain before Reynolds encounters the preemptive shadow of her own earlier book. Best, then, on the later years—the years of her own friendship with Sayers—that Reynolds has already described so sympathetically. Fans of Lord Peter may feel let down. (Thirty b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09787-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
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