A lifetime selection of Hemingway's professional non-fiction as a reporter and columnist, this is a long-awaited book in the hardcover canon of the century's most imitated and most envied writer, and the man who built the tallest legend. His perfectionism seldom wavers in these pieces, though the later selections from Look magazine are in the garrulous Papa manner. The selections are in five categories. His four years (1920-1924) as a "Canadian" reporter for the Toronto Star find his famous tight style taking shape through Paris and the capitals. (For this period, Hemingway's work is better represented in Dell paperback— Hemingway: The Wild Years—which has forty-eight stories in addition to the twenty-five in By Line However, By-Line contains "Christmas on the Roof of the World" which the Dell book does not and which is the most moving, exciting story in either book.) The second period (1933-1939) contains his columns on fishing, bulls and the Spanish Civil War. While the style is still great, the Papa figure intrudes, not unpleasantly, and the stories are less tensely organized. The third period is high-powered reportage on the Civil War for North American News Alliance, and the fourth section finds "Ernie Hemorrhold, the poor man's Pyle" going into the Normandy beachhead on D-Day for Collier's. The last section is potpourri from the big slicks. By-Line contains dozens of incidents later novelized or used in short stories. Perhaps the century's greatest travel writer, his European catalogue of winds, breezes, trees, funiculars, rivers, lakes, wines and fiestas are nonpareil. As Lillian Ross might have put it, Hem feller have heap big magic.
Pub Date: May 29, 1967
ISBN: 0684839059
Page Count: 489
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1967
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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