Workmanlike but rather prosaic.
A tale of two detectives.
In this dry foray into the ever fascinating life of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), celebrity biographer Sandford (Union Jack: JFK’s Special Relationship with Great Britain, 2017, etc.) seeks to “show the ways in which Doyle himself consistently applied both the intellect and innate sense of justice (if not always the mercurial powers of observation) of his immortal creation.” It may come as something of a surprise to Sherlock Holmes’ legions of fans that his creator was often personally involved in real-life criminal cases. Doyle, a successful author who also maintained a medical practice, “consistently came to the defense of the persecuted or oppressed”—and “if the aggrieved party happened to be a lady, so much the better.” Sandford examines a number of cases Doyle took a personal interest in, including the famous disappearance of Agatha Christie in 1926 and his defense of the later-debunked photograph of the Cottingley fairies, which Sandford calls Doyle’s “most notorious literary act,” but he largely focuses on two scandalous crimes: the 1906 case of the young Anglo-Indian lawyer George Edalji—the subject of Julian Barnes’ outstanding novel, Arthur & George—who was accused of writing a series of anonymous, inflammatory letters to his father, the Rev. Edalji, as well as mutilating cattle. He was found guilty and imprisoned. Sandford meticulously describes Doyle’s involvement in the case. He met with George and became an ardent supporter of his innocence in the pursuit of justice. Doyle insisted that his persecution “owed more to racial prejudice and to rank blundering on the part of the authorities.” Doyle also became an active participant in the case of Oscar Slater, who supposedly robbed and murdered an elderly Glasgow woman. Doyle “spoke persuasively about the shortcomings and contradictions of Slater’s prosecution.” Sandford’s discussion of Doyle, Harry Houdini, and spiritualism is a rehash of his earlier book, Masters of Mystery (2011).
Workmanlike but rather prosaic.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-07956-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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