Book of the week: Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 by Paul Hendrickson

Hendrickson's “rich and enthralling” new book offers a clear-eyed assessment of the writer and what led him to suicide at the age of 61.

(Knopf, $30)

“There exists a general feeling” that Ernest Hemingway “was better earlier; the books were better, he was better as a man,” said James Salter in The New York Review of Books. At age 35, he was already being called out by critics for the egotism and self-indulgence in the works that followed The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Paul Hendrickson’s “rich and enthralling” new book picks up the great writer’s life at that moment, when he fulfills a lifelong dream by purchasing a 38-foot seagoing fishing boat and begins using it as an escape. The decision to give the Pilar center stage “feels inspired,” said Steve Weinberg in CSMonitor.com. During Hemingway’s final 27 years, as his writing and eventually his mental state both declined, the boat was where he lived—fighting marlins, his demons, sometimes even his friends.

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