While this much-needed revisionist biography sheds new light on the great novelist, it too often obscures the facts of her life behind webs of speculation about what she and her intimates might have thought or felt. Just before her early death in 1817 at age 41, Jane Austen wrote to a niece, ``Pictures of Perfection make me sick & wicked.'' It is ironic, then, that the novelist's family and subsequent biographers should have endeavored to conceal her (and her family's) blemishes. Displaying an impressive command of the Austen archives, Nokes (English Literature/Univ. of London) in contrast highlights various Austen family scandals and exposes how Austen's own mercurial character, for all its virtues, had its vicious side. He shows one of Austen's cousins to have quite likely been the illegitimate daughter of Warren Hastings, the controversial governor of British India; he also attends closely to an aunt's humiliating brush with the law. Nokes eschews anachronistic labels: He portrays Austen not as a modern genius awaiting recognition, but as the sometimes romantic, sometimes caustic wit her family knew. Over and beyond his recognition of how family scandal helped inspire Austen's romantic imagination and solidify her moral sense, Nokes contributes to Austen studies with a series of local observations: He questions, for example, the conventional wisdom that Austen found her sojourn in Bath traumatic. His desire to recreate the world and the writer known to Austen's intimates, however, leads Nokes to indulge overmuch in florid, novelistic renderings of the Austens' various points of view. It would be hard to blame general readers for preferring Valerie Grosvenor Myer's straightforward and accessible sketch of Austen from earlier this year (p. 360). Nokes's portrait of a less-than-perfect Austen, then, while it offers new insights and a wealth of detail, employs too much imagination and takes too narrow a perspective to finally satisfy. (b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-11326-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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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