A closely reasoned, well-researched and eminently fair account of a gifted and giving man who married a miracle.
A generous and sympathetic portrait of the complex and fiercely intelligent man (1880–1969) who is best known as Mr. Virginia Woolf.
A novelist (Electricity, 1995, etc.) and literary biographer (Jonathan Swift, 1999, etc.), the author brings to her work both a scholar’s fastidiousness and a novelist’s imagination and fondness for speculation. As Glendinning notes, Woolf in some ways led a remarkably happy life, his wife’s 1941 suicide and other family tragedies notwithstanding (his father was killed by a horse-drawn omnibus). Always a strong student, voracious reader and liberal thinker—a man who until the end of his life was firing off trenchant and contentious letters to newspaper editors—Woolf had a successful early career as a civil servant in Ceylon, wrote a novel about the country that remains a classic there today, befriended some of the leading minds of his generation (Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot), founded the Hogarth Press, married one of the most remarkable women in literary history, published countless essays and reviews in the most respected journals of the day, wrote well-received books of political theory and autobiography. And—perhaps his greatest pleasure—he created a prize-winning garden at the Woolfs’ home, Monks House, now a museum and literary shrine. Glendinning shows Leonard as a loving companion for the troubled and fragile Virginia, a man who never ceased caring for her even in her darkest moments. The author also deals thoroughly with the varied sexual interests and performances of the principals (late in life, Leonard blurted out at an editorial meeting: “My wife was a lesbian”) and writes with bemusement of the elderly Woolf’s appeal for younger women, one of whom, an American, wrote him hundreds of affectionate letters. Glendinning also writes frankly about Woolf’s intransigent insistence that religions—all of them—were primitive bunk.
A closely reasoned, well-researched and eminently fair account of a gifted and giving man who married a miracle.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-4653-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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