A close look at a 19th-century author and abolitionist that integrates her personal life, her work, and the eventful period in US history during which she lived. Karcher (English, American Studies, Women's Studies/Temple Univ.; Shadow Over the Promised Land, not reviewed) is a staunch advocate of her subject, tracing the ``trajectory'' of Child's life from her earliest fiction through her anti-slavery work and later advocacy of women's and Indian's rights. Child (180280), who entered the literary limelight with Hobomok, a novel sympathetic to Indians and hostile to patriarchy, compounded her success by founding Juvenile Miscellany, a hugely popular children's magazine. But love came to Child at a high price: Her husband, newspaper editor David Lee Child, was a terrible businessman who accumulated debts faster than she could cover them. Karcher, clearly appalled by a woman ``abasing herself to the husband responsible for sabotaging her career,'' indicates that Child's early opposition to gender equality could have been rooted in devotion to her marriage. Need for cash drove her to write on domestic economy, but after an 1830 meeting with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, her life and writings acquired a greater goal. With the publication of her first major work on slavery, Child's formerly adoring public became incensed, the Juvenile Miscellany folded, and her activities as an anti- slavery activist put her in danger (as Karcher's comments on mob violence effectively indicate). Karcher is at her best when Child herself is a lion; less impressive are the occasional psychological speculations (e.g., on the possible connection in Child's mind between abolitionist John Brown and her parents) and excuses for Child not meeting late-20th-century standards for political correctness (e.g., depression and housework kept her from fighting the Fugitive Slave Law). This valuable portrait of a complex and talented woman may be most notable for indicating the extent to which she was of- -rather than ahead of—her time. (10 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8223-1485-1
Page Count: 785
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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