Substantial and thoughtful, written with sympathy and affection. (16 pages b&w illustrations; 40 additional b&w...
A critic and novelist (English Settlement, not reviewed, etc.) examines the short, stressful life (1811–63) of the great Victorian writer.
An unabashed Thackeray fan, Taylor begins with the novelist’s death on Christmas Eve and informs us that 2,000 people attended the interment of a man whose prodigious output in periodicals and serial novels exceeded one million words between 1846 and 1850. (He also wrote up to 2,000 letters per year.) In a volume with a generous supply of illustrations (many by Thackeray himself, who had started out as the proverbial starving artist), the author traces the Thackeray family back to a band of Yorkshire yeomen. Later generations worked for the East India Company. (Returning to England from India, where he was born, the five-year-old Thackeray glimpsed Napoleon at St. Helena.) Taylor follows Thackeray through Charterhouse School, then to Cambridge (he left with substantial gambling debts but no degree). After struggling as an artist, Thackeray worked for various publications, most notably Punch, before he began writing novels. He married in 1836, but his wife suffered from mental illness and spent most of her adulthood in private care. Taylor describes keenly the competition between Thackeray and his principal rival, Charles Dickens; their fragile amity was shattered in the late 1850s when Thackeray sided with Dickens’s abandoned wife. (Dickens did write a generous testimonial in Cornhill, the monthly that Thackeray edited.) Taylor portrays Thackeray as a gentle giant (he was 6’3”) and as a man who loved his daughters (he shaved a moustache because it frightened them) and who wrote what Taylor considers the finest of all Victorian novels, Vanity Fair. As Peter Ackroyd did in Dickens (1990), Taylor employs his talents as a novelist to include scraps of invention (e.g., a death notice by George Eliot); he inserts, as well, a couple of discursive interludes. (Scholars, however, will find the notes insufficient and will rue the absence of a chronology and comprehensive list of Thackeray’s works.)
Substantial and thoughtful, written with sympathy and affection. (16 pages b&w illustrations; 40 additional b&w illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0910-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
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