While exploring the life of his human subject, Downing also effectively draws us to visit Tuscany, to stay and absorb its...
Downing (The Calligraphy Shop, 2003) delivers an illuminating biography of Janet Ross (1842–1927), who led the Anglo-Florentine community through the belle epoque and into the 1920s.
The early-19th-century seekers of wisdom and beauty landed in Florence and rarely ventured into the countryside, preferring to wallow in the culture of the cities and enjoy the affordable cost of living. Ross and her banker husband, Henry, first lived in Egypt for years, where she immediately showed her inherited talent for mixing with the locals and becoming one with her environment. She descended from a matriarchy of independent, self-sufficient women who imbued her with a great sense of self-worth and an inquiring mind and whom she described in Three Generations of English Women. In 1865, the Rosses moved to Florence in post-Risorgimento Italy and found her family’s contacts and her quick ability to learn languages opened all doors for them. They rented a country villa, and Ross soon became the Padrona, working side by side with the peasant farmers and learning to dare una spintarella, or give a nudge, a crucial art in Italy. Her wide network of friends and relations ensured a steady flow of interesting visitors to their last home, Poggio Gherardo. She was not necessarily a personable woman; in fact, she was often rude, ornery and surly, but most put up with her. But her love for Italy and the Tuscan countryside was unquestionably pure. “If our current collective obsession with Tuscany is another version of the ‘sickly love’ of the Anglo-Florentine’s,” writes the author, “Jane’s was a healthy love—measured, skeptical, informed, slow-building, and ultimately deep and more rewarding for all that realism.”
While exploring the life of his human subject, Downing also effectively draws us to visit Tuscany, to stay and absorb its magic.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-23971-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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