A minor effort for readers interested in learning more about Mead’s early life.
Blum (Bad Karma: A True Story of Obsession and Murder, 1986) reconstructs the five-year period of Margaret Mead’s life leading up to and including her transformative trip to Samoa in 1925.
Throughout her long and respected career, Mead was seldom a stranger to controversy, either in her progressive views about sex and relationships or in her approach to research. Her provocative reputation was further bolstered by her memoir, Blackberry Winter (1972). Since her death in 1978, she has been the subject of several biographies as well as Lily King’s acclaimed novel Euphoria (2014), which explores the sexual tensions that arise between a group of anthropologists on a tribal expedition; the characters are loosely based on Mead, her second husband, Reo Fortune, and future husband, Gregory Bateson. Sexual tensions are also at the heart of this latest biographical exercise, and Blum provides a structure more akin to fiction. Drawing from letters, diaries, and memoirs, she weaves a dramatic tale around the intimate relations of the individuals who were central to launching Mead’s career. The key players were Mead’s instructor at Columbia, Dr. Ruth Benedict, linguist Edward Sapir, her first husband, Luther Cressman, and, in later chapters, fellow anthropologist Fortune. Though the author tracks Mead’s career pursuits, they remain peripheral to the emotional drama as the heated love triangle among Sapir, Benedict, and Mead takes center stage. Cressman was also along for the journey, as their marriage was continually in jeopardy and finally collapsed under the strain of Mead’s attraction to Fortune. Though the narrative is a frequently absorbing, occasionally breathless page-turner, the individuals are narrowly portrayed through the span of their infatuations and come across as flat. The brilliant writer and thinker that Mead would become is hardly evidenced by the self-absorbed, love-obsessed woman depicted here.
A minor effort for readers interested in learning more about Mead’s early life.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-05572-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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