A sweeping, analytic, first-class biography of Rachel Carson from Lear (Environmental History/George Washington Univ.). Carson may have had a forceful mother, may have grown up in iron-and-steel Pittsburgh (thus getting an early introduction to foul air), had one storied intellectual mentor after another, toiled in the trenches of the Fish and Wildlife Service for many years; but important as all this may have been in shaping her vision of the natural world—and these moments are given their due, as this book is formidably detailed—Lear concentrates her efforts on Carson the writer, both of books (Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea, and, of course, Silent Spring) and of a wealth of magazine articles, where Carson was convinced she would make enough money to devote herself to full-time writing. Carson understood that she had the enviable ability to combine a scientific background with a liquid prose style to communicate the workings of our mysterious, intricate living world with passion, speaking not just to the converted but to the sprawling, educated, postwar middle class. Though intensely private, she was also shrewdly aware of how best to mix magazine serial rights with book publication dates, how to get in the running for various awards and prizes. Lear fleshes out the portrait with Carson's friends, agent, and publishers; her tumultuous family life; her myriad illnesses (including the cancer that killed her); and how, in characteristic nonconformist fashion, Carson held tight to her femininity in the masculine world of nature writing. Though not infrequently starstruck by her subject, Lear provides enough anecdotes, and intelligently overviews the genesis and guiding currents of Carson's work, to make her reverence appear a natural response. Call this biography definitive. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-3427-7
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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