A study- with newly interpreted evidence from his own writings and other sources- of the tragic brother of the gifted Bronte sisters, this throws fresh light on the dour background, the home life- less grim than usually pictured- and, unfortunately, the limitations of medical knowledge in handling Branwell's undoubted epilepsy. Largely, however, Daphne du Maurier has chosen to recreate the "Infernal world" which Branwell and Emily had made so much their own from childhood on that the Nagrian tales, as they are called, mirrored the overlapping of truth and fiction, of a lost identity, which plagued Branwell throughout his brief and tortured life. Failures contributed to his breakdown and at twenty five he faced an empty life, his paintings ignored, his writings inadequate, his health irreparably damaged by the use of drugs and liquor to alleviate the congenital weaknesses. This is an odd book for Daphne du Maurier to have undertaken, unless the weird fascination of the Bronte story found answering echo in her own attraction to somewhat morbid settings and themes. Her craftsmanship has made of the material something more than a case of literary research; almost one feels that she is unravelling a long distorted mystery. But it is unlikely that even her name will achieve for it the wide and sure popularity of her earlier work.
Pub Date: March 10, 1961
ISBN: 1844080757
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1961
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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