Indeed, Vonnegut emerges as irascible, ungenerous and usually unkind, “flinty, defensive, and sarcastic,” which will surely...
The life of a once-lionized writer who is gradually, it seems, being forgotten today.
“We are what we pretend to be,” wrote Vonnegut in his novel Mother Night, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut didn’t pretend to be much, preferring to let others invent roles for him, such as shaggy-haired dispenser of goofy wisdom or the dark chronicler of the gloom and doom that technology and consumerism would one day visit upon us all. One has to feel some pity for Shields (Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, 2006, etc.), who began this biography with Vonnegut’s blessing; alas, Vonnegut died as Shields was beginning to work, and Vonnegut’s widow and son deauthorized the book, refusing to allow Shields to quote directly from a body of 258 letters that Shields himself had “received from his correspondents.” The result is a slightly choppy piece, though the main threads will be familiar to readers of Vonnegut’s work. For one thing, he was a moralist through and through—and a self-aware one who noted, “People are constantly demanding moralizing…that’s certainly what people want to hear when they ask me to lecture.” For another, Vonnegut quite deliberately chose the vehicle of science fiction to warn about the dangers of science—though, as Shields’ book illuminates, at least some of Vonnegut’s distaste for technology was a reaction to a brother with whom he had lifelong issues. Though guilty of unnecessarily overwritten passages, Shields is a sympathetic and responsive reader of Vonnegut’s work, which deserves to be taken seriously even when so often dismissed as literary pranksterism, and even though the last couple of decades of it frankly wasn’t very good. The author also cuts Vonnegut some of the necessary slack, since to be a writer by definition is to be a selfish and peevish being—and so Vonnegut was.
Indeed, Vonnegut emerges as irascible, ungenerous and usually unkind, “flinty, defensive, and sarcastic,” which will surely disappoint admirers who wanted him to be something better.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8693-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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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