A book that is going to cause some annoyance and much discussion. Is Alice B. Toklas a real person? Yes, she is, very much so, secretary and companion and close friend of Certrude Stein for many years. Why the title? Because Alice Toklas was always threatening to write her autobiography, which, Gertrude Stein knew, would in essence be her biography, based on a close intimacy. When the writing was postponed repeatedly, Gertrude Stein announced that she would do it herself. This is the result. This the title. Explain it to your customers if you can. The text is really Gertrude Stein's autobiography, though it gives a delightful background of Alice Toklas, a background of sympathy, cooperation, friendship, and life made up of little things such as cooking and sewing, and making the wheels go round. As a biography of Gertrude it is fascinating. One gots a vivid swift picture of a childhood in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and in Europe; of college days at Radcliffe and at Johns Hopkins studying medicine. After 1907 she lived with her brother in Paris and one meets Piccasso, Matisse, Juan Cris — the moderns who were trying to make the world see what they saw. And there were many from the writing world, too, Sherwood Anderson, Van Vechten and others. She was always writing, always worried because the world did not understand her. So lucid and sympathetic a study is this, that one feels one could go back to her writings and understand them now. There is no affectation here, none of the stream of consciousness method. Intensely interesting, and should have more than a moderate sale.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1933
ISBN: 067972463X
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1933
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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