Instead of the promised revelations from hitherto censored materials offering a more ``vibrant'' Jane Austen, Tucker assembles a reference guide to Austen's life, a genealogy of her relatives, friends, some people she never met at all, and gossip long since refuted. Readers who savor connectedness, relationships, coincidence, and triviality may appreciate this reference guide to Austen's social life, already depicted ironically in her novels. Here are the provincial towns (Steventon, Bath, Southampton, and Chawton), the flirtations, friends, cousins, scandals, the places she traveled (not far, not many), her religious practices, and the people she almost knew, that literary demimonde of Regency England. William Beckford's uncle was married to her brother's wife's aunt; another aunt's cousin was a friend of George Crabbe; an uncle's barrister was William Cowper's confidante; and seven years after Austen's death, Byron's body lay in state in her niece's London parlor. Austen's neighbors at Steventon, like her neighbors everywhere, their houses' lineages, occupations, and marriages are delineated with the same care and affection as are the men she flirted with, didn't marry, and even the women they didn't marry. These men had the unlikely names of Digweed, Fowle, Heartley, and Powlett; there's an unsubstantiated rumor of a summer romance with John Wordsworth, the brother of the poet. Tucker (a Virginia-based journalist and author of A Goodly Heritage: A History of Jane Austen's Family, not reviewed) describes Austen's interest in private theatricals, piano, art, dancing, her attitude toward the foppish prince regent, her reading, and her interest in the scandals, suicides, affairs, elopements, and petty crimes of friends and relatives. The very kind of pedantry that elicited Austen's most stinging satire, reproducing the whole petty and suffocating social network her fiction indicts.
Pub Date: June 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-12049-4
Page Count: 270
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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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