An elegant, well-wrought, and objective biography of a complex but relentlessly unlikable figure. Posterity's picture of Evelyn Waugh has memorialized his frankly piggish demeanor as much as his elegant, barbed prose, and Hastings's sympathetic yet clear-sighted appraisal is likely to leave such impressions intact. Having broken free early from the stifling conventionality of an Edwardian childhood that is deftly sketched by Hastings (Nancy Mitford, 1986), Waugh liberated himself at public school and Oxford into his lifelong traits of snobbery, selfishness, barely veiled misogyny, and reactionism. Waugh's mundane origins notwithstanding, he managed to reinvent himself with spectacular success as spokesman for England's gilded nobility; hence one of the major satisfactions of any life of Waugh is the evocation of a vanished world of privilege. Hastings sets about this task with aplomb, bringing expertly to life personalities from Waugh's expansive acquaintance, famous (including Cyril Connolly and Nancy Mitford) and obscure (such as Alastair Graham, the ``original'' of Brideshead's Sebastian Flyte), in a series of vivid pen-portraits that delineate both their relationship to Waugh and how he represented—or as often misrepresented—them in his own writing. Hastings gives a full and revealing picture of Waugh's midlife conversion to Catholicism and the decisive impact this had on his subsequent self-image and work; her analysis of the sources and merits of Waugh's writing, too, is insightful and judicious. In the end, however, perhaps the strongest impression left by this biography is of a writer who like no other great (or nearly great) artist was possessed of so little basic human sympathy. (63 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-71821-X
Page Count: 724
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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