Best known as the creator of the enduringly popular sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers gives us glimpses of her life in this selection of vivid and often entertaining correspondence. This collection, which comprises only a fraction of the letters Sayers left, follows the author from her youth—she is only five when she writes the first, remarkably articulate, letter here—through the period of her fame as a mystery writer who is just beginning the religious works of her later years. Throughout, Sayers presents herself as an intriguing combination of reticence ("I never can write about my feelings") and brashness ("I really am a vulgar child"). Intelligent and a keen observer of her surroundings, she demonstrates the ability to sketch character and setting long before she pens her first novel. She does not hesitate to turn her lively sense of humor on herself, as when she notes that her unsuccessful verse translation of the Song of Roland sounds well enough "chanted aloud in the bath-room." Sayers taps all of these abilities to turn out controlled and for the most part upbeat letters, even when she is riding out her infatuation with writer John Cournos, struggling to establish her financial independence, making living arrangements for the illegitimate son she bore and "adopted" but never acknowledged, and coping with a husband who is given to "odd fits of temper." Fans of Sayers's mystery writing will particularly relish some of the later entries that show the author at work: for example, those to Dr. Eusatce Barton sorting out the details of their collaborative novel, The Documents in the Case, and those touching on the work it takes to get the play Busman's Honeymoon to the stage. Absorbing reading on its own, and a worthy companion to Reynolds's biographical Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (1993.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14001-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
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