In a biography thick with the historical and literary milieu of Marian ``George Eliot'' Evans, Karl (Franz Kafka: Representative Man, 1991, etc.) proves sensitive to the Victorian contradictions she faced as a first-rate intellect, a sensitive individual, and a plain woman. When ``George Eliot'' arrived with Scenes of Clerical Life, Marian Evans's life (181980), already two-thirds complete, was unknown to the public—a state she tried to preserve against what she called ``hard curiosity.'' Her life still holds many secrets, but Karl embarks on psychological anaylsis of her depressive personality and speculation about her private life while arguing for her as the representative Victorian voice over Dickens, Carlyle, and Ruskin, delving ably into her creative process in Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Although Karl starts strongly with her childhood in the slowly industrializing Midlands of the early Victorian era, he handles with less insight her intellectual development during her Evangelical phase and her expanding progressive education later (particularly her attachment to German culture and philosophy). Things pick up again with Evans's launching of a serious career in letters and her move to London. There she had fraught relationships with Westminster Review publisher John Chapman and future Darwinist Herbert Spencer. Karl argues that her unconventional relationships with men (the Chapman set-up was a virtual menage Ö quatre), while emotionally frustrating, allowed her to escape Victorian restrictions on women and to absorb intellectual resources before moving on. This process clicked with her lifelong companion George Lewes, who, though unable to divorce his wife, lived with Evans as a husband in what she called ``dual solitude.'' Though Karl falls short of fully comprehending Evans as an individual, his biography carefully depicts both the ceaseless intellect and the woman in one of the Victorian era's outstanding novelists. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03785-1
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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