Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | 921 SALINGER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 813.54 SHI | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
THE BOY WHO BECAME A REBEL. THE REBEL WHO BECAME A SOLDIER. THE SOLDIER WHO BECAME AN ICON. THE ICON WHO DISAPPEARED.
Raised in Park Avenue privilege, J. D. Salinger sought out combat, surviving five bloody battles of World War II, and out of that crucible he created a novel, The Catcher in the Rye , which journeyed deep into his own despair and redefined postwar America.
For more than fifty years, Salinger has been one of the most elusive figures in American history. All of the attempts to uncover the truth about why he disappeared have been undermined by a lack of access and the recycling of inaccurate information. In the course of a nine-year investigation, and especially in the three years since Salinger's death, David Shields and Shane Salerno have interviewed more than 200 people on five continents (many of whom had previously refused to go on the record) to solve the mystery of what happened to Salinger.
Constructed like a thriller, this oral biography takes you into Salinger's private world for the first time, through the voices of those closest to him: his World War II brothers-in-arms, his family, his friends, his lovers, his classmates, his editors, his New Yorker colleagues, his spiritual advisors, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Their intimate recollections are supported by more than 175 photos (many never seen before), diaries, legal records, and private documents that are woven throughout; in addition, appearing here for the first time, are Salinger's "lost letters"-ranging from the 1940s to 2008, revealing his intimate views on love, literature, fame, religion, war, and death, and providing a raw and revelatory self-portrait.
Salinger published his last story in 1965 but kept writing continuously until his death, locked for years inside a bunker in the woods, compiling manuscripts and filing them in a secret vault. Was he a genius who left the material world to focus on creating immaculate art or a haunted recluse, lost in his private obsessions? Why did this writer, celebrated by the world, stop publishing? Shields and Salerno's investigation into Salinger's epic life transports you from the bloody beaches of Normandy, where Salinger landed under fire, carrying the first six chapters of The Catcher in the Rye . . . to the hottest nightclub in the world, the Stork Club, where he romanced the beautiful sixteen-year-old Oona O'Neill until she met Charlie Chaplin . . . from his top-secret counterintelligence duties, which took him to a subcamp of Dachau . . . to a love affair with a likely Gestapo agent whom he married and brought home to his Jewish parents' Park Avenue apartment and photographs of whom appear here for the first time . . . from the pages of the New Yorker , where he found his voice by transforming the wounds of war into the bow of art . . . to the woods of New Hampshire, where the Vedanta religion took over his life and forced his flesh-and-blood family to compete with his imaginary Glass family.
Deepening our understanding of a major literary and cultural figure, and filled with many fascinating revelations- including the birth defect that was the real reason Salinger was initially turned down for military service; the previously unknown romantic interest who was fourteen when Salinger met her and, he said, inspired the title character of "For Esmé-with Love and Squalor"; the first photographs ever seen of Salinger at war and the last known photos of him alive; never-before-published love letters that Salinger, at fifty-three, wrote to an eighteen-year-old Joyce Maynard; and, finally, what millions have been waiting decades for: the contents of his legendary vault- Salinger is a monumental book about the cost of war and the cost of art.
Author Notes
David Shields was born in Los Angeles, California on July 22, 1956. He received a bachelor's degree in English literature from Brown University in 1978 and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1980. He writes both fiction and nonfiction books. His first novel, Heroes, was published in 1984. His other works include Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, How Literature Saved My Life, and Other People: Takes & Mistakes. Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity won the PEN/Revson Award and Dead Languages won the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. He is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The culmination of over 200 interviews and almost a decade of research, Shields (How Literature Saved My Life) and Salerno, director of the documentary accompanying the book, offer an oral history, effectively blended with narrative and analysis of the iconic writer and his body of work. In lesser hands, this approach could quickly spiral out of control, but Shields and Salerno keep the story on track. Granted, many mileposts and lore-such as Salinger's predilection for young girls or Catcher in the Rye's influence on high-profile assassinations-will not be all that revelatory but the authors' impressive collection of first-person accounts by those who were there gives readers greater insight into the writer and his place in the world. Literary snippets, such as "I'm Crazy," a short story Salinger wrote in Europe that was the first story narrated by Holden Caulfield, and asides-"Jesus, he has a helluva talent," Hemingway is reported to have said of Salinger-combined with a number of photos will make this a must-read for fans of the celebrated author. Photos. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Overstuffed, thoroughly revealing biography--from oral and written sources, and always episodic--of the legendary writer. The big news in Shields (How Literature Saved My Life, 2013, etc.) and Salerno's book, the companion to Salerno's documentary, has been the promise of several new books, completed and approved by Salinger, that will be issued between 2015 and 2020. One is a World War II story, and therein hangs another tale--and a long part of the present volume. Other biographers have noted how strong a part Salinger's wartime experience played in his subsequent thought, but Shields and Salerno chase down the story in minute detail, including Salinger's witness to the liberation of Nazi death camps and the psychological breakdown that ensued: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." As he went into combat at Normandy, we learn, Salinger carried six chapters of Catcher in the Rye--"not only as an amulet to help him survive," Shields notes, "but as a reason to survive." Catcher, Salinger's most famous book, was of course autobiographical, and Shields and Salerno lend specific weight to just how and how much. They also link Salinger's famous hermitage, beginning in the 1950s, not necessarily to a desire to flee fame so much as a fulfillment of the Vedanta ideals he had adopted as another kind of sanity-preserving talisman, in which withdrawal from and eventual renunciation of the world is necessary. No question but that Salinger was troubled--and, as the testimonial of former paramour Joyce Maynard and others has it, capable of cruel and creepy behavior. About the only drawback of Shields and Salerno's book is their overly credulous reliance on other writers and their heavy-handedness in piling on the heaps of negativity (some deserved) about Maynard and her ambitions. Was Salinger the major artist he has been held up to be? This book helps defend the affirmative response and whets the appetite for the Salinger books to come.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Coauthors Shields and Salerno take a much different approach to unveiling the hidden life of J. D. Salinger than Kenneth Slawenski took in his J. D. Salinger (2011). Both books represent nearly a decade of research, and both draw on some of the same material previously published books on and memoirs about the writer, as well as letters made available since Salinger's death (Shields and Salerno add years of interviews to the mix). Slawenski constructs a traditional biographical narrative from the stew of secondary sources, while Salerno and Shields present the same stew one bite at a time. In fact, their quasi oral history is the print companion to Salerno's recently released documentary, also titled Salinger. (The book jacket of this volume proclaims itself the official book of the acclaimed documentary film, though early reviews of the production have been almost universally negative.) The book and film follow a roughly chronological track, though the reader emerges with much less of a sense of the flow of Salinger's life here than in Slawenski's account. Instead, we get an enormous clip book showcasing the authors' research: excerpts from hundreds of interviews with people who had some contact with Salinger and dozens more who had no contact at all but experienced some of the same things Salinger did (mainly WWII) or, in the case of various celebrities, were simply moved by his work. (Do we really need to know what The Catcher in the Rye meant to John Cusack?) But the authors have unearthed some genuinely new material, including interviews with Jean Miller, the first of many teenage girls, on the cusp of adulthood, with whom Salinger had a relationship; more commentary from Salinger's fellow soldiers and from his close friend Paul Alexander than has been previously published; and new interviews with Joyce Maynard, author of a Daddy Dearest -style memoir about her years as one of the author's teen obsessions. Salinger devotees will find all of this laundry airing either endlessly fascinating or cheap and salacious, depending on their tolerance for laundry. But out of all this material, do Shields and Salerno attempt to make sense of this legendarily hidden and peculiar life? Yes, they do, and while many will find quibbles (the excessive attention, for example, paid to the fact that Salinger had only one testicle), overall their vision of Salinger conforms to much of what we have heard before: an ambitious young man who dreamed of publishing stories in the New Yorker, who went through hell in WWII (D-Day, Huertgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, Dachau) and who used writing he worked on Catcher throughout the war as a kind of meditation, an escape from the horrors of battle; who suffered from 1945 through his death from post-traumatic-stress syndrome, finding that fame was, for him, a new kind of battlefield to find escape from; and who finally did escape from the world by retreating to New Hampshire and by immersing himself in the Hindu philosophy Vedanta. Or, as the authors sum it up, The war broke him as a man and made him a great artist; religion offered him postwar spiritual solace and killed his art. It is a consistent point of view, and while certainly an oversimplification, it is well supported by the wealth of commentary included here. What's lost in all this welter of detail about a troubled man and his peculiar, contradictory life is Salinger's writing. There are snippets of perceptive analysis from Shields and from some of Salinger's fellow writers, and there is plenty of connecting the biographical dots (Jean Miller as the model for Esme in For Esme with Love and Squalor), but most readers will come away from this book feeling that what's lost in this messy, muddled hodgepodge of a biography about a messy, muddled life is the precision and clarity of Salinger's best stories.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Some books are wonderfully enhanced by being produced for audio, but this is not one of them. Though this title was written as an oral history, and all of the narrators (Peter Friedman, January LaVoy, Robert Petkoff, and Campbell Scott) are excellent readers, the audio version deprives listeners of important pieces included in the book, e.g., the photographs and, crucially, the footnotes and annotations that explain who the many people being quoted actually are. The narrative itself contains an exhaustive amount of often fascinating information about J.D. Salinger but is unwieldy and oddly structured, with some information revealed chronologically, while other facts appear in sections titled "Conversation with Salinger," and many quotes are repeated multiple times in different places in the book, not always to helpful effect. No one can deny that this work contains a tremendous amount of information that may be of interest to the author's fans, but no real fan could listen to this audiobook without cringing at the idea of how much he would have hated such a program. Those who are not devotees of Salinger can be expected to have a difficult time making it through nearly 20 hours of sad, unflattering anecdotes and speculation about a man whose few published books continue to speak so deeply to his readers. VERDICT Despite fine performances by the narrators, readers with an interest in Salinger may be better served by this biography in its printed form.-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
