A handsomely illustrated volume that reflects Benfey’s depth of reading and passionate interests, though the connections he...
Ambitious, eccentric synthesis of late 19th-century artistic currents shows a static America progressing after the Civil War into a period of movement and romance.
As evidenced by his previous teeming works, Benfey (The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan, 2003, etc.) likes to keep the literary pot boiling. In this elegant but not entirely cohesive study, he uses the hummingbird as a metaphor for the postwar era’s evanescent spirit, and as a means of spotlighting the shared interests of the actors he has assembled. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a radical writer who served as a colonel in the Union army, published essays about hummingbirds that were read avidly by Emily Dickinson, who in turn wove the birds into poems and wrote to Higginson for literary advice. Harriet Beecher Stowe, credited by President Lincoln with starting the Civil War with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sheltered, named and drew pictures of a wounded hummingbird, which Benfey argues became a stand-in for her troubled, alcoholic son Fred. Martin Johnson Heade, recognized for his paintings of salt marshes and haystacks, traveled to Brazil to paint hummingbirds; his work was beloved by Stowe and her brother, abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, for whom the bird was a metaphor for the delicate female parishioners he seduced. Heade’s comely apprentice and crush, Mabel Todd, mingled with the Dickinsons in Amherst, Mass., offering Emily her sketches of hummingbirds while having an affair with the poet’s brother Austin; Mabel later helped bring Emily’s work to the public light. One life dovetails into the other in this spiraling contemplation, which shows itinerant journalist Mark Twain emerging from his own trip to the tropics “at a critical moment of self-recognition,” recognizing that Heade had undertaken “a kindred quest.”
A handsomely illustrated volume that reflects Benfey’s depth of reading and passionate interests, though the connections he makes are occasionally strained.Pub Date: April 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-160-8
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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