Erudite and scholarly and brimming with quotations—qualities that will appeal more to those who reside in academe than in...
In an impressive array of pieces—all previously published, most substantially revised—a historian examines the moral views of novelists, politicians and philosophers.
Himmelfarb (The Roads to Modernity, 2004, etc.) deals with figures who for most will range from the familiar (George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill) to the barely known—or unknown (Walter Bagehot, John Buchan). Himmelfarb writes with ease about these figures, as though she has somehow integrated them into her own capaciously conservative philosophy. Sometimes the questions she asks seem trivial: Why, for example, does Dorothea marry Ladislaw? she wonders in her discussion of Middlemarch. But that question sends her to the heart of Eliot’s novel. The author praises Dickens for his moral imagination, for bringing “the poor into the forefront of the culture”—not as some sort of vague “class,” but as individuals. There are flashes of humor, too: In a discussion of Austen, Himmelfarb confesses that she preferred Clueless to the 1996 film Emma, feeling the former was “more in keeping with the spirit of the original.” The author examines, more or less rigorously, the novels written by political figures Disraeli and the aforementioned Buchan. For the latter’s efforts, she has extracted some amusing passages, but she is perhaps a bit quick to excuse his racism and anti-Semitism. There is a graceful review of Penelope Fitzgerald’s book about her relatives, the Knoxes (The Knox Brothers, 2000), concluding that it was the brothers’ “character and beliefs” that made them significant. Not all of the writing is graceful, however. Some passages—especially in her essay on Trilling—are dense with -isms, thick with literary allusions.
Erudite and scholarly and brimming with quotations—qualities that will appeal more to those who reside in academe than in Spoon River.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-56663-624-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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