Graceful, psychologically astute portrait of the enigmatic author/scholar/explorer who was one of the first Christians to enter Mecca, discovered Africa's Lake Tanganyika, and translated such masterpieces as the Kama Sutra and The Arabian Nights. Published in England last year to commemorate the centenary of Burton's death, this biography marks a decided advance over McLynn's plodding Stanley (1990). While McLynn organizes the known facts of Burton's life with admirable economy and clarity, it is when he speculates on his subject's quirky—and frequently self-defeating, proto-fascist, and woman-hating—reactions to his milieux that he achieves some of his most telling effects. For example, McLynn discusses Burton's repressed homosexuality and persuasively argues that, as a young officer in India, Burton actually took part in the sexual activities he described in his report on male brothels in Karachi. Equally convincing is McLynn's theory that Burton's lifelong misogyny stemmed from his failure as a heterosexual lover during his army career. Among other well-rounded portraits here are those of John Hanning Speke, Burton's fellow explorer who was eventually designated the discoverer of the sources of the Nile, and of Isabel Arundell, the neurotic woman whom Burton married and who destroyed many of his most important documents after his death. The Arundell portrait very nearly walks off with the book, in fact, as McLynn captures the conflicting facets of her character—fawning wife, relentless promoter of her husband's reputation, religious zealot, social snob—in highly evocative detail. Excepting McLynn's fondness for arcane words and foreign phrases (``foetor,'' ``feculent,'' and ``canaille'' all appear in a single sentence)—a compelling and satisfying depiction of a man and an era, a worthy companion to Edward Rice's best-selling Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990). (Eight pages of b&w illustrations, four maps.)
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-7195-4818-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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