A feast for the Mark Twain fans, and a fitting commemoration of this, his 100th anniversary year. Read it for the many-faceted portrait of the man in all his roles that emerges from the lovingly prepared text. Meltzer has skillfully woven together a running commentary, chronological in essence, into which he has inserted extracts from a generous variety of Mark Twain's own writings. The result is virtually a biography- done in a different way - as it treats of his boyhood, his early apprenticeship as a printer, his introduction to river life as a child- and his education as a pilot. You learn about his homes, his schools and teachers and schoolmates; you meet the originals of Tom Sawyer, of Huckleberry Finn, of Becky Thatcher, of Aunt Polly (his mother); you visit with him and his cousins at his uncle's farm; you learn of the activities and entertainment in a Missouri small town. Sam Clemens had an itching heel- and his travelling began early and took him from coast to coast and often to Europe. He wrote to finance his trips- and various of his travel letters and journalistic pieces have found immortality between book covers. Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, Innocents Abroad- all grew out of his passion for going places and seeing things- and people. His marriage stabilized all this- to some extent- and a happy marriage and family life it was, despite many sorrows and losses that came to him, his only son, usy, Livy (his wife) and finally Jean. His career as a writer, as a lecturer, encompassed the major years of his life- and all this is followed in this abundant text. And then there are the pictures:- daguerreotypes, tintypes, sketches (some of his own), photographs, old prints, cartoons, reprints of broadsides, posters, news notes, clippings, letters — much of the material never before used and totalling an incredible 500 and more. A bonanza!
Pub Date: June 15, 1960
ISBN: 0826214126
Page Count: 322
Publisher: T.Y. Crowell
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1960
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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