Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
“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,NewsweekFavorite Books 2011 “A lyrical and expansive search for the essence of a famous writer—heart, soul, and hull.”            -Julia Keller,Chicago Tribune Top Picks of 2011 “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 EconomistBooks of the Year 2011 “Hendrickson’s engrossing book offers a fresh slant on the rise and fall of a father figure of American literature.”                       -San Francisco ChronicleBest Books of 2011“Hendrickson deftly maps out the ‘irresolvable differences’ within Hemingway in this rather unusual take on biography, explaining that although Hemingway’s writing is ‘rooted in geography’ and ‘linear movements’, his life, ‘like his boat, beat against so many cross-currents’—as Hendrickson’s own exploration does, taking many ‘departures from the main frame’. In doing so, he surveys a huge amount of information: boat journals, letters—Hemingway wrote several thousand over his lifetime—and interviews with figures routinely seen as footnotes by most major Hemingway biographers. . . . The boat is the spiritual centre of the book, and however far Hendrickson strays he always brings us back to her, bobbing on the azure waters. . . . [T]he book becomes more than a study of Hemingway; it is a study of frailty, imagination, humanity, fathers and sons (all kinds) and torment. . . . ‘Memory is hunger,’ Hemingway wrote inA Moveable Feast. Hendrickson has achieved the near impossible and increased that hunger. InThe Snows of Kilimanjaro, Papa writes, ‘No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude’, yet Hendrickson gets closer than most, taking the mantle out of the hands of the industry and into the arms of poetry.”          -The Irish Times “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 WeeklyBest Books of 2011: The Top 10 “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 Boatis 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,The New York Review of Books “Large-minded [and] rigorously fair . . . An indispensable document . . . 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,The Washington Post “A rich book and a wandering one . . .Hemingway’s Boatis 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,The Wall Street Journal “Heartbreaking . . .Hemingway’s Boatincludes 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,The New York Times Book Review “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 “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 “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 “This unfailingly intelligent meditation on the achievement of genius and the corrosion of fame brings a man we thought we knew to life in a wholly different light.”            -Newsweek “[Pilar is a] brilliant conceit. . . No wan symbol or factitious theory [serves] as blinkered Virgil, but instead a tactile, intensely documented, sensual, action-crammed vessel that [carries] a rich cargo of story . . . The utilitarian yet graceful lines of Pilar form a sturdy armature for the sculpture of Hemingway that Hendrickson hews from the marble of history in Hemingway’s Boat. Thanks to Hendrickson’s insights, his laborious research, and his sturdy, cannily wrought, often lyrical prose, the famed novelist comes alive again in uncluttered, fresh dimensions, vividly at the helm of his boat once more.”            -Paul Di Filippo,The Barnes & Noble Review “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 “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 who...