The authors’ affection for their subject is warmly communicated in this biography of David-Neel (1868—1969), the French Tibetophile who was the first European woman to explore the once forbidden (to foreigners) city of Lhasa. The Fosters already have one biography of David-Neel to their credit (Forbidden Journey, 1987). In their preface to this book, they present it as an entirely revised edition of the earlier one, incorporating information gleaned from additional source materials and interviews. The authors’ characterization of their subject’s many writings—“witty and entertaining”—applies as well to their own. The biography opens as a movie might, on David-Neel’s surreptitious departure from Lhasa in May 1924, after having entered illegally following a perilous journey. Succeeding chapters flash back to her childhood, marriage, and first journeys east, culminating in the great trek by foot to Lhasa. The final chapters on the end of her life, back in France, also review her major writings, which include autobiography, novels, translations of Tibetan texts, and studies of Buddhism. The many epithets used throughout the book, in lieu of the heroine’s name—the seeker, adventurer, pilgrim, scholar, orientalist, iconoclast—give some feel for the scope of her character and work. The authors present her as a Tantric mystic who scorned mystification; an ascetic who laid carpets in her Tibetan cave-dwelling; a radical democrat who, a colonialist still, condescended to her adopted Sikkimese son: in short, as the union of opposites that many deeply religious people are. The authors’ principal concern is that David-Neel be remembered for her part in preserving Tibet’s religious legacy—especially now that it is under attack—through the texts she translated and saved for the West, including Tibetan versions of works no longer available in the original Sanskrit from the early Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. From the joint talents of the authors (a librarian and a novelist) comes a winsome biography that takes its subject more seriously than itself. (26 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-87951-774-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An informative and brisk biography of a courageous journalist, by the senior US senator from Illinois, a follow-up to Simon's 1964 YA biography (Martyr to Freedom, not reviewed). Himself a former newspaper editor, Simon (Winners and Losers, 1989, etc.) assays the life and career of Elijah Lovejoy. Born in Maine in 1802 and educated at what is today Colby College, Lovejoy decided to seek his fortune in the West. A determined youth despite his supposedly frail constitution, he walked to Missouri when he could afford no other form of transportation. In St. Louis, he worked as a teacher but quickly became dissatisfied with the profession. He bought a half-interest in the St. Louis Times in 1830 and became its editor. At first he opposed the abolitionism of radicals like William Lloyd Garrison, favoring the repatriation of blacks to Africa, but by 1834, two years after he left the Times and eight months after he started a new paper called the Observer, he had decided that ``slavery as it now exists among us, must cease to exist.'' His abolitionist views and rabid anti-Catholicism soon brought him into conflict with slavery-supporting St. Louisans, and the Observer's offices were vandalized and much of the printing equipment destroyed. Lovejoy moved to Illinois, a free state where he thought he would receive a better hearing. His attacks on involuntary servitude encountered the same hostility there, however, since the state had been settled mostly by Southerners. He died in 1837, two days before his 35th birthday, defending his press against a drunken mob. Was he a zealot and a madman, or a visionary and martyr? Or, like John Brown, was he perhaps both at once? Simon attempts to answer these and other questions about a stubborn and courageous man whose story deserves to be more widely known. Enlightening and accessible to any reader interested in the struggle against slavery and for civil liberties.
Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-8093-1940-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
A meager memoir from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Simpson (In the Room We Share, 1991, etc.). Simpson's father, retrospectively cast as a kind of Prospero (the memoir's title alludes to The Tempest), was a highly successful Kingston (Jamaica) lawyer who divorced Simpson's mother, estranged himself from Simpson and his brother, and allowed his new wife effectively to disown them after his death. In the memoir's opening section, Simpson presents an unoriginal reading of Caliban and colonialism in The Tempest, which he proceeds to graft onto his experience of Jamaica's independence movement and his frustrated childhood in an unresponsive family and a beastly Anglophilic boarding school. About his experiences in Jamaica, Utah Beach and the Battle of the Bulge, Columbia University, and a New York publishing house, Simpson has already written at greater length and with more feeling. His latest treatments of these subjects (first published in The Hudson Review) read like dislocated stopgaps, while his essays about his later life as a poet and professor are simply pedestrian. Only one essay, ``The Vigil,'' in the book's closing section, stands out. In it, Simpson delicately balances a description of his uprooted academic routine during his mother's terminal illness with a review of her adventurous life in Russia, Jamaica, New York, and Italy. Concluding with his return to a Jamaica that has not improved with independence—its population exploding and its economy a shambles apart from tourism—Simpson finds a certain redemption in revisiting the dilapidated manor of his childhood home where squatters now live more happily than he did. Though this volume covers a lot of ground, too many of these events have already been chronicled in his essay ``The Other Jamaicans'' (in North of Jamaica, 1972) and his novel Riverside Drive (1962).
Pub Date: Dec. 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-934257-09-4
Page Count: 202
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
