Rigorous and scholarly, but an introduction rather than an advancement in knowledge.
A swift life of the author of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), whose corporal and hygienic eccentricities matched in uniqueness the brilliance of his mind.
Nokes (English Literature and Creative Writing/King’s College, London; Jane Austen, 1997, etc.) does not add much to the biographical detail of Johnson’s remarkable life (1709–1784), but he emphasizes that Johnson’s most celebrated biographer, James Boswell, was often more interested in portraying his own proximity to his subject than the subject himself. Nokes notes that Boswell spent fewer than 500 days in Johnson’s presence in a two-decade period, and manifestly did not, as some think, cling like a remora to the flank of the shark. The author also depicts a sometimes dilatory Johnson, who often found myriad reasons not to begin or continue with a commission. A notable example was The Lives of the Poets, which was supposed to be a series of brief prefaces to a multivolume anthology of English poets. Johnson, however, devoted some scattered years to the project, whose modest dimensions soon ballooned. Nokes spends little time summarizing or assessing the quality or enduring significance of Johnson’s work, but he does attend well to chronology, quoting liberally and effectively from Johnson’s correspondence and personal records. The author examines Johnson’s boyhood, his complex medical and psychological profile, his marriage to an older woman, his struggles to become a writer, his long loving relationship with Hester Thrale and his affection for young novelist Fanny Burney, whose 1778 novel Evelina he praised. Curiously, Nokes often neglects to provide a year for certain events, requiring inquisitive readers to page backward to do uncertain calculations.
Rigorous and scholarly, but an introduction rather than an advancement in knowledge.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8651-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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