A splendid introduction to a pivotal figure in the history of English literature. (21 b&w illustrations)
The first in a new series, Ackroyd Brief Lives, offers a fascinating portrait of the man who has been called the father of English poetry.
Ackroyd (The Origins of the English Imagination, 2003, etc.) vividly depicts 14th-century London and the busy life of Geoffrey Chaucer. The poet, Ackroyd makes clear, was not an ivory-tower figure but a man of the world: a courtier entrusted by successive kings with diplomatic missions abroad and a civil servant who supervised royal building projects and oversaw the collection of taxes on wool and leather in the Port of London. Though brief, the biography is filled with details bringing Chaucer’s world and work to life. We see the younger man being educated in the royal court, rising in the diplomatic service, absorbing the culture of France and Italy, and acquiring a reputation as a courtly poet. Records are scanty, but Ackroyd cites evidence of his various financial dealings and legal entanglements, including an indictment for rape as well as lawsuit over debt. Given the many gaps in the records, speculations are inevitable, and when discussing specific events, Ackroyd relies on hedges like “might have,” “could have,” “it has been argued that,” and “we can possibly imagine.” The core of the book, however, concerns Chaucer’s work as a poet, and here Ackroyd is on firmer ground. He quotes frequently from the poems—The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, and, of course, The Canterbury Tales—explaining allusions, discussing style, illustrating the influences of French and Italian poets, especially Boccaccio, and pointing out Chaucer’s skill at manipulating the English language. You get a clear sense of English as an evolving language, and, for those puzzled by Chaucer’s version of it, Ackroyd includes an appendix with modern translations of all the quoted material.
A splendid introduction to a pivotal figure in the history of English literature. (21 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50797-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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