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DARKNESS VISIBLE

A MEMOIR OF MADNESS

Styron tells of his descent into clinical depression, later hospitalization, and recovery. Much of this slim (96-page) work appeared last year in Vanity Fair magazine. In 1984, Styron's 30 years of alcohol and more recent excessive tranquilizer intake (Halcion) combined to make alcohol poisonous to his system and deprived him totally of his friendly balm, the alcohol that he says allowed him to open up his works as a clear mind never could (he adds that he never wrote while drinking). Shortly thereafter, he went into depression, which he thinks may or may not have been tied in with going cold turkey off booze. He puts forth various genetic hints (his father had "battled the gorgon for much of his lifetime") and suggests buried childhood events to explain the origins of his illness. His depression would sweep over him late in the day, just at the time of the afternoon nap he could no longer achieve and apparently just before the hour of the first drink that he could no longer have. The depths of his depression carried him far beyond alcohol withdrawal and pill poisoning, Styron says. In general, the tour of the depression he renders is gripping, though simply as writing it could have done with more intense immediacy and searing detail. It's best when dramatizing a deepening stage in the illness, and it comes to a high point when Styron decides to kill himself and throws his private diary into the garbage. By then we are convinced that his illness is as he says, "so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression." Only various lines from Dante, he thinks, come near to showing his experience. He admires his wile Rose for standing by him at his most obliterated, and we get a sense of uplift when his hospitalization and new drug begin to take hold. His scathing review of antidepressants seems just. Each victim of depression is unique, and we feel that Styron has shown us—in large strokes without getting as razor-edged as Robert Lowell—as much of his black pit as he can bear to show.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1990

ISBN: 0679643524

Page Count: 84

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1990

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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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