A stiff, workmanlike approach to the life of a noble figure.
Dense, encyclopedic biography of world-renowned intrepid proponent for Italian social justice.
A “strong and independent” boy born into a coastal trading family on July 4, 1807, in Nice, Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) rejected his parents’ efforts to steer him toward the more distinguished career paths of a doctor or attorney and quickly learned the ranks of his father’s maritime livelihood (and officially set sail as an apprentice seaman) in his teens. Soon, though, his demanding work at sea was replaced with a heady interest in political activism, most notably with the Italian unification movement “Young Italy,” which was spearheaded by liberal reformist Giuseppe Mazzini, who would emerge as Garibaldi’s mentor. He abandoned a stint in the Sardinian navy in favor of a poorly organized insurrection and ended up in Brazil in 1835. This proved to be just the beginning of many causes the patriotic libertarian would become embroiled in; freeing people from the binds of tyranny and oppression became his life’s work. After engaging in land- and water-based warfare against the Brazilians, Garibaldi met his first wife, Anita, who bore him a son, Domenico, who also joined him on his missions. Adopting guerrilla warfare tactics both on land and at sea, he became a leader and hero in his continued support of exiles and emigrants in Montevideo, Uruguay, and in Italy, where he fought against the Austrians to defend the Roman Republic. After being exiled, he spent time in Tangiers, the United States and England, and moved on to fight in a resistance against a new French Republic. A serious injury prevented him from becoming a major general in the American Civil War’s Union Army, but a burgeoning writing career produced four novels and his memoirs. Scirocco frequently refers to Garibaldi’s autobiographical “memoirs” for direction within the narrative, but he depicts many events with a hazy, cautious speculation since dates and activities remain unclear even in Garibaldi’s own text. Still, the author does a serviceable job of commingling relevant historical factoids with the extraordinary life of this unwavering “quintessential hero.”
A stiff, workmanlike approach to the life of a noble figure.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-691-11540-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
