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ROSS MACDONALD

A BIOGRAPHY

Hagiographic, rags-to-riches, writer-as-middle-class-hero tale; the first biography of a genre master who wrote 18 highly literate detective novels featuring southern California private eye Lew Archer and earned an enormous following among mainstream readers, academes, and literary celebrities. Kenneth Millar (his real name) died at the age of 67 in 1983 of Alzeimers in Santa Barbara, where he lived for most of his adult life with his wife, the Canadian mystery novelist Margaret Sturm Millar. The son of an itinerant newspaper editor, Millar was raised by relatives in central Canada after his family fell apart. An athletic, bisexual loner, he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Colerdige while teaching at the University of Michigan and turning out detective mysteries based on Greek tragedies, with complex characterizations, intricately detailed southern California settings, and Millar’s distinctively rueful compassion for lost children. Among his early fans were New York Times critics Anthony Boucher and John Leonard, who stage-managed Macdonald’s ascent to international fame with enthusiastic praise. Nolan, a biographer of rockers Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers Band (not reviewed) and mystery reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, finds few faults in the shy, slow-talking “philosopher king of detective novelists,” even if Millar seems to have had little understanding of the forces that pushed his tormented alcoholic daughter to suicide. Still, it’s hard not to cheer when Macdonald’s literary idealism, his faith in hard work, his support of lesser-known writers, and his relentless urge for middle-class respectability produce a body of work that brings its author most of the rewards, awards, rave reviews, Hollywood deals, fan worship, and happiness that the writing business can offer. A breathlessly enthusiastic font of praise—most of it justifiable—that also works as a schematic for the demons, both professional and personal, that motivate some of our best writers to toil tirelessly in the genre fields.

Pub Date: March 12, 1999

ISBN: 0-684-81217-7

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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