Luminous proof that history glows with emotion. (11 b&w illustrations)
Lanyon’s graceful, compelling account of her pursuit of the story of the son of Hernán Cortés and Malinche, an Amerindian woman who was the subject of the author’s Malinche’s Conquest (2000).
In this swift, lucid blend of history and memoir, Australian writer Lanyon tells of her hours in archives, her discoveries in Mexican and Spanish sites, her emotional journey back to the 16th century to unravel the complicated story of the eldest Cortés son. Compounding the author’s difficulties was Hernán Cortés’s decision to name two of his sons Martin, the elder illegitimate, the younger his lawful heir. (Lanyon’s sources sometimes failed to distinguish between the two.) The author has hit upon an effective technique she employs throughout—to summarize the events and then to slip into the first-person to tell about both her research and her thoughts and feelings as she made her discoveries. This makes for a very engaging narrative. Lanyon calls Martin “a true child of the New World,” one of the first children born to a Spanish invader and an Amerindian woman, a Mayan held in slavery by the Aztec at the time Cortés made his conquests. It’s likely that Martin did not remember much about his mother—when he was six, his father took him to Spain, where the boy served in the court of both Carlos V and Felipe II. Later, Martin returned to Mexico with his brothers (including the other Martin) and watched this other Martin steadily sink into a dissipation that not only ruined his reputation but made him vulnerable to accusations of treason that resulted in the executions of his friends (grisly moments well-described) and the permanent banishment from Mexico of the brothers Cortés. Lanyon’s most wrenching writing comes when Martin Cortés (the good son!) endures torture by rack and water but steadfastly declares his innocence. Later, back in Spain, recovered, Martin died in the military service of the emperor.
Luminous proof that history glows with emotion. (11 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-306-81364-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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
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