Occasionally displays the author’s characteristic acerbity—but generous to a fault.
A generous, even admiring, biography of the late English poet laureate (1906–84) known for his sing-songy verse (some call it doggerel), his BBC broadcasts, his devotion to the Church of England (despite his unconventional private life) and his determination to save England’s notable older buildings from the wrecking ball.
The prolific Wilson—novelist (My Name Is Legion, 2005, etc.), biographer (Jesus: A Life, 1992, etc.), social historian (After the Victorians, 2005, etc.)—found himself in the news recently when it was revealed that he included in the UK edition of Betjeman a bogus letter (planted by a rival?); the first letters of the sentences in the middle of the letter combine to spell A.N. Wilson is a shit. Betjeman himself would have laughed at the puckishness—but disagreed with the nasty sentiment, for no one could ask for more sympathetic treatment than Wilson has given the poet. Wilson argues that about 30 of Betjeman’s 200 or so published poems “actually hit their mark.” And the author casts a most compassionate light on Betjeman’s intimate relationships. He was married in the 1930s (to Penelope Chetwode) and sired two children, but he also had numerous affairs, including one of some 30 years’ duration with Elizabeth Cavendish. The pudgy poet teetered back and forth between wife and mistress like a tawdry teddy bear. Betjeman did have a remarkably charmed life. One of his secondary-school teachers was T.S. Eliot; his tutor at Oxford was C.S. Lewis (they disliked each other intensely). His little boat eventually floated into some of the most exclusive social waterways—he attended the wedding of Princess Margaret, hung out with celebrities of all sorts. Wilson properly credits Betjeman for his pioneering work with the BBC (early on, he saw and exploited the potential of television) and with the fledgling architectural preservationist movement. Absent here is something essential: a chronology of the poet’s life with a list of his published titles.
Occasionally displays the author’s characteristic acerbity—but generous to a fault.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-11198-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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