A challenging mix of American history and a unique biography that at times can wring the heart but that can’t escape the...
A stimulating intellectual biography of Laura Bridgman, a blind and deaf girl whose triumph over her own adversities made her as famous in the 1840s as Helen Keller was to be many years later.
Gitter (History/CUNY) excels at describing the fluid and dynamic intellectual currents of the Victorian era, especially in Boston (where Laura lived after her early childhood on a New Hampshire farm). The 1830s were the heyday of the New England Renaissance, which placed great stock in the doctrine of human perfectibility. The great humanitarian Samuel Gridley Howe tried to translate this belief into action at the Perkins Institution of the Blind, which he took charge of in 1832. He set about to show that the deaf and the blind could be educated and trained just like anyone else. Bridgman, who was born in 1829 and lost her sight and hearing at two, became the perfect test case for him. She arrived at Perkins in 1837, and the rest of her life—she died in 1889—was shaped by her association with Howe. Intelligent, with a quick and curious mind, Bridgman soon learned to read, write, and (using a manual alphabet) communicate. Realizing her value, Howe encouraged public displays of her abilities, and there were visits by such luminaries as Charles Dickens (who described her in his American Notes). Although Bridgman was said once to have been as famous as Queen Victoria, the public lost interest as she grew from a beautiful child into a gawky adult woman—and (though cared for at Perkins until her death) toward the end of her life she was described as solitary, lonely, and frustrated, sustained only by her deep religious feelings.
A challenging mix of American history and a unique biography that at times can wring the heart but that can’t escape the melancholy of its end. For another biography of Bridgman, see Ernest Freeberg’s The Education of Laura Bridgman, above.)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11738-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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