Hemingway's Boat (Hendrickson) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Heartbreaking.... Hemingway’s Boat includes some of the most moving, beautiful pieces of biography I have ever read.... In the best of these streaming "other lives." ...  Hendrickson’s two strongest gifts—that compassion and his research and reporting prowess—combine to masterly effect.
Arthur Phillips - New York Times Book Review


A rich book and a wandering one.... Hemingway’s Boat is about Hemingway, about what was good in him and what was bad, about what brought a man who took pleasure in so much to the point where he could take his own life. It is about the joy he spread and the infection he carried.... For Hendrickson, discovering just how unhappy and unsettled Hemingway was for so long makes him more of a hero. He states his case persuasively, which is why this book is so good.
Allan Massie - Wall Street Journal
 

Large-minded [and] rigorously fair.... An indispensable documen.... With this sterling summation of the entire Hemingway canon, Hendrickson shows what has eluded some very able scholars. A writer’s life can contain two conflicting existences, one of purely original genius and one of irreversible destructiveness. It’s a lucky genius who gets credit for the first and a free pass on the second. Hendrickson issues no free pass to Papa. He gives the ravaged old man something more honest: a fair summing-up of a life like no other.
Howell Raines - Washington Post


Brilliant.... Through painstaking reporting, through conscientious sifting of the evidence, and most of all, through vivid, heartfelt, luminous writing, Hendrickson gets to the heart of both Hemingway and his world.... Hendrickson writes sentences that seem lit from within—but not in a showy way. Rather, they glow with the yearning of the humble seeker, the diligent observer who understands that we’ll never get to the end of the Hemingway story—yet we have to start somewhere.
Julia Keller - Chicago Tribune -Top Picks of 2011


Writing with stylistic verve, great heart and profound insight, Paul Hendrickson gives us a fresh way to understand one of the most written-about, fascinating characters in American letters.... Hendrickson doesn’t reveal Hemingway’s life as much as he illuminates it with his characteristic passion and intelligence, in a great match of biographer and subject.
Elizabeth Taylor - Chicago Tribune


Hendrickson’s engrossing book offers a fresh slant on the rise and fall of a father figure of American literature.
San Francisco Chronicle - Best Books of 2011


Glorious.... A copious, mystical portrait.... [Pilar] proves that there just might be one more way of telling Papa’s story.... Hendrickson handles her like the relic she is, and makes of her a cunning, capable metaphor for Hemingway’s contradictory drives.... Hendrickson fills in the negative space exuberantly. He imagines each scene completely, and then imagines himself into it. The book becomes a participatory biography—the details are rendered with a hallucinatory intensity.... This big-hearted book leaves us with a litany of sorrows, but also images of grace: of heroism in Gigi’s muddled final moments; of tenderness and lucidity in Hemingway’s paranoid last days; and of Pilar and her promise of escape, renewal, and the open sea.
Parul Sehgal - Cleveland Plain-Dealer


An often lyrical mélange of biography, lit-crit meditation and straight reportage...Hendrickson delves deep into the margins, running down fascinating profiles of a handful of characters who had been treated like bit players in earlier works and searching for renewed significance in some episodes that had previously been relegated to footnotes.... Smart and lovingly crafted, a worthy addition.
Larry Lebowitz - Miami Herald


Paul Hendrickson wrote Hemingway’s Boat almost as a rebuke to the many conflicting Hemingway biographies and "daffy critical studies." If he could ground a narrative in something that existed and still exists, that Hemingway loved, if he could learn about such a treasured possession, then maybe he could learn something about Hemingway, too. He does, in spades, and so do Hendrickson’s lucky readers.... Captivating.
Roger K. Miller - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 

This may be the great Hemingway book of the past twenty years. It gives us, at long last, the New Hemingway we’ve needed. We are persuaded that, at long last, we have somehow encountered Hemingway whole—apparition and monster, buffoon and barbarian, literary titan and pretender, macho man and soft-hearted benefactor, and above all, the great artist wrestling with anxieties that are secret gifts and advantages that were vicious impediments.... [Hendrickson is] so attentive to detail that he will notice the polish on a woman’s nails, but, at the same time, so intuitive that he can neutralize some of the oldest toxins flowing through the bloodstream of Hemingway’s life narrative.
Jeff Simon - Buffalo News


Engrossing.... Movingly told...Hemingway’s Boat brings a commanding personality—and all the fears and insecurities that came with it—brilliantly to life side by side with the lives of minor characters, neglected witnesses who have their own stories to tell.
J. Malcolm Garcia - Kansas City Star


The most honest and honestly excellent prose about Papa Hemingway to date.... Hendrickson’s quirky, compelling, and compassionate biography of a literary lion slants great.
Linda Elisabeth Beattie - Louisville Courier-Journal


I read [Hemingway’s Boat] without a pause.... [It’s] a biography that is at once admiring and devastating, and full of material that I wouldn’t have thought even existed and of people who knew Hemingway whom I’d never heard of—an eye opener of a book, full of unexpected riches, fascinating digressions, and leaving one at the end wishing the book were longer, and thinking long and hard about the price of fame and success in America, and the dangers of seemingly getting everything you wanted out of life—it just may be the best book I’ve read this year, and certainly the best book I’ve read about an American writer in a long, long time.
Michael Korda - Newsweek - Favorite Books 2011
 

Rich and enthralling.... Paul Hendrickson is a deeply informed and inspired guide. He often appears in the first person, addressing the reader and exhorting him or her to speculate, imagine, or feel. He has researched exhaustively, been to the places Hemingway frequented, and talked to whoever was part of or had a connection to the Hemingway days. His diligence and spirit are remarkable. It is like traveling with an irrepressible talker who may go off on tangents but never loses the power to amaze.... Hemingway’s Boat is a book written with the virtuosity of a novelist, hagiographic in the right way, sympathetic, assiduous, and imaginative. It does not rival the biographies but rather stands brilliantly beside them—the sea, Key West, Cuba, all the places, the life he had and gloried in. His commanding personality comes to life again in these pages, his great charm and warmth as well as his egotism and aggression.
James Salter - New York Review of Books
 

The author, an accomplished storyteller, interprets myriad tiny details of Ernest Hemingway’s life, and through them says something new about a writer everyone thinks they know.
The Economist - Books of the Year 2011

 
There’s never been a biography quite like this one.... The stories are rich with contradiction and humanity, and so raw and immediate you can smell the salt air.
Publishers Weekly - Best Books of 2011: The Top 10