A methodical opus comprising intensive memoir and inquisitive investigation.
An exacting inquiry into Shakespeare’s First Folio and the art of extreme book collecting, demonstrated by the life of a pathological bibliophile.
In her debut, lifelong Shakespeare enthusiast Mays (Economics/California State Univ., Long Beach) meticulously details the “curiously unexamined” life of millionaire businessman Henry Clay Folger (1857-1930), an obsessive, discriminating Bard collector who acquired an extremely rare, inaugural edition of dramatic works known as Shakespeare’s First Folio. He then went on to spend millions on other collectible tomes with the intent to amass as many Folio copies as possible and enact text comparisons with each—“to subject them to meticulous comparative analysis.” Mays begins with Shakespeare’s rise to prominence among London theater and literary circles. His death in 1616 left half of his oeuvre as yet unpublished until unauthorized attempts at collecting these works produced the much-pirated “Pavier Quarto” (False Folio), followed by a modest, laborious printing of the First Folio and subsequent editions thereafter. Mays describes this undertaking in vivid detail, and she confidently presents Folger as a driving force behind the eventual success of industrial giant Standard Oil, a position that would provide him with the wealth to pursue his obsessive passion. However, the impetus of Folger’s burgeoning interest in Shakespeare’s Folios remains a mystery even to Mays, whose scrupulous research is evident from her revealing closing notes and bibliography. Folger’s proliferating “Foliomania,” which endured throughout the early 1900s until his death, comprises the remainder of the book. Without becoming fiddly, the author assembles Folger’s “forgotten” lifetime through chapters brimming with biographical specifics (some known, some fascinatingly obscure) of his and wife’s substantial estate, and she honorably resurrects this affluent, rapacious eccentric who became wholly consumed with the acquisition of a priceless bonanza of Shakespeariana.
A methodical opus comprising intensive memoir and inquisitive investigation.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4391-1823-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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