Illuminates Orwell’s political convictions and gives fleeting but vivid glimpses of his personal qualities.
A representative selection, culled from the 20-volume Complete Works, which Davison co-edited, of correspondence by and to 20th-century England’s fiercest literary opponent of totalitarianism.
There are very few letters from the childhood of Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name) and none from the years as an imperial policeman in Burma that formed his anticolonial and socialist views; the collection really begins in 1934, not long after the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London introduced the 31-year-old author under the pen name George Orwell. Most are by Orwell himself, but gaps in the historical record are filled by correspondence from others. The letters of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, are particularly valuable; livelier and much more personal than the author’s, they give intimate glimpses of the couple’s home life and sometimes-fraught relationship. Their warmth makes palpable the awful loss inflicted by 39-year-old Eileen’s death during surgery in 1945, a trauma only hinted at in Orwell’s dignified, reticent account of the event. In general, he is a brisk, businesslike correspondent; among the few exceptions are affectionate references to his adopted son and a few emotional 1946 letters to his London neighbor Anne Popham, which add some nuance to the 2007 controversy over charges that Orwell’s wooing style was aggressively close to rape. Readers seeking insights into the creation of Animal Farm or 1984 will find only a few scattered sentences, and nonfiction, such as The Road to Wigan Pier, is similarly referred to mostly in passing. The correspondence does convey Orwell’s strong, principled political positions, especially his revulsion against fellow leftists who “set up a double standard of political morality, one for the U.S.S.R. and the other for the rest of the world.” Grim letters chronicling the worsening tuberculosis that killed him remind us how prematurely we lost this ardent voice for a single standard of truthfulness and common decency.
Illuminates Orwell’s political convictions and gives fleeting but vivid glimpses of his personal qualities.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-87140-462-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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