A valuable addition to the biography of an underrated literary figure.
Biographies of famous writers by their offspring usually have modest literary value, but this memoir is a cut above the rest.
Hammett’s best-known novels, The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, pioneered hardboiled detective fiction, and many critics consider him a literary master. His life was chaotic. Discharged after WWI because of tuberculosis, he married his pregnant nurse and struggled to earn a living in a series of jobs from Pinkerton detective to advertising copywriter. Within a few years, however, he began to write fiction, quickly developing his distinctively spare style. His first novel, Red Harvest (1929), enjoyed great success. A year later, The Maltese Falcon was a smash hit. In 1931, he met playwright Lillian Hellman, his companion for the rest of his life. By now he was living apart from his family, ostensibly because of TB. But he continued to support them when he could, visited often, and remained a generous, affectionate father. The ’30s were Hammett’s golden years. Money poured in from royalties and film sales. Never one to plan ahead, he spent it even faster. When he enlisted during WWII, the Army, suspicious of his leftwing politics, assigned him to the American equivalent of Siberia: the Aleutian islands. He enjoyed his stint immensely, however, editing the base newspaper and writing the official history of the Aleutian campaign. After the war, his life went downhill. He emerged from six months in prison for defying the HUAC to the blacklist. The IRS claimed most of his income. His health declined, and when he died in 1961, he hadn’t completed a novel in over two decades. Though the author undertakes no extended analysis of her father’s works, she candidly relates his drinking, gambling, womanizing (Hellman comes out surprisingly well), and attraction to Communism. As a bonus, her account is packed with family photographs, clippings, and mementos.
A valuable addition to the biography of an underrated literary figure.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0892-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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