This painstaking biography finally separates Hemingway the man from his apparently carefully self-cultivated myth. Full of contradictions, Hemingway was a communist AND a government conservative - a man's man who was open about enjoying sexual role play as a woman. He refused throughout his life to be defined or categorized. Returning from the battle fields of WW I, rejecting his suburban Illinois home and its mores - he reaped the rewards and punishment of a an extreme life lived on the edge. Most striking are two themes. First is the destructiveness of his closest relationships. He came from a tortuous family history of deep depression and frequent suicides. His first wife "accidentally" lost 2 years of irreplaceable work, his third wife left him in the hospital with a serious brain injury to compete with him as a WW II journalist, and his fourth wife neglected to lock up the gun cabinet upon his return from a locked mental ward due to suicidal tendencies. Second is Hemingway's inability to recognize his own physical limits. Hemingway experienced a debilitating brain injury from a serious car accident resulting in a subdural hematoma (internal bleeding of the brain), but continued to engage in extremely risky travel without allowing time for recovery. Ultimately he compounded his injury with two additional serious concussions These brain injuries, as they are wont to do, appeared to have changed his personality to the extent that he completely alienated his beloved adult children, who completely renounced him. At the end of his life, Hemingway is a tragic figure. Despite earning wealth, fame and even the Nobel prize through his deeply felt artistic integrity and talent, in the end he was banished from his beloved home and community of over 20 years in Cuba due to the Castro coup. He was completely bereft from the loss of his memory and mental faculties, due to a combination of barbarous electroshock therapy, legally prescribed narcotics, and alcoholism. The similarities with Marilyn Monroe's life trajectory - another legendary contemporary "woman's woman" to his "man's man"- are striking. One cannot help but admire the man who lived life on his own terms, or in his own powerful words, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so."
Review of Hemingway
