From NY Review of Books: Hemingway

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/13/finest-life-you-ever-saw/?pagination=false

"Hemingway’s declining health and psychological problems were more serious at the end of the 1950s. He had shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic and believed the FBI was following him. (In fact FBI agents had compiled a large file on him.) He was delusional and slurring his speech. It was kept from the public. He was unable to write as much as a single sentence. In chilling detail Hendrickson gives the almost step-by-step account of his final hour when he rose early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, put on his slippers, and went quietly past the master bedroom where his wife was sleeping. The suicide could be seen as an act of weakness, even moral weakness, a sudden revelation of it in a man whose image was of boldness and courage, but Hendrickson’s book is testimony that it was not a failure of courage but a last display of it.

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.

'Forgive him anything,' as George Seldes’s wife said in the early days, 'he writes like an angel.'”