by Barry Werth ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001
A riveting account of a gentle man overwhelmed by one of the waves of American hysteria that occasionally obliterate our...
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A poignant, distressing portrait of Arvin (1900–63), one of our premier literary critics, whose distinguished career as a professor and writer was destroyed by the revelation of his homosexuality.
Werth (Damages, 1998, etc.) employs his considerable reportorial and narrative skills to relate the sad case of Arvin, whose 37-year teaching career at Smith College and whose trenchant studies of Hawthorne and Herman Melville (among others) had earned him a peerless reputation in the groves of academe as well as in the larger literary world. The story begins on September 2, 1960, when the police arrive at Arvin’s door in Northampton, Mass., to arrest him for possession of pornography (a felony under Massachusetts law at the time). Faced with the very real possibility of a prison sentence, Arvin became an informer and gave police the names of others involved in what became known as the “Smith College Homosexual Scandal of 1960.” Werth then leaps back to 1924—the year Arvin arrived at Smith—and proceeds to outline his swift, astonishing ascent to the very pinnacle of his profession. Arvin’s friends—Van Wyck Brooks, Carson McCullers, Edmund Wilson, Granville Hicks, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sylvia Plath—were a veritable Who’s Who of American literature. And the friendships weren’t entirely intellectual, either: One of Arvin’s lovers was Truman Capote, with whom he had a passionate two-year relationship and whose undying devotion supported him in his most trying times. Arvin had psychological problems throughout his life; he was institutionalized many times and in 1952 underwent a course of electroshock treatments. In the grim anti-gay decades of the mid-20th century, he had tried to live as a heterosexual (a marriage, a divorce) and as a closeted homosexual—decisions that shredded him psychologically. But when he could work, he worked spectacularly well (his study of Melville won a National Book Award). Werth devotes the final third of his book to the public humiliation of Arvin and some of his gay colleagues and ends with a brief update on the careers of the principals involved.
A riveting account of a gentle man overwhelmed by one of the waves of American hysteria that occasionally obliterate our national common sense.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49468-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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