A biography for those who love Woolf, and for those who want to love her all the more by knowing her all the better.
A biography of the last decade of Virginia Woolf’s life that generously grants the reader an intimate view of her extraordinary world.
Marder (English/Univ. of Illinois) outlines a simple and honest theory of biography in his introduction, and it is a tribute to his skills as a writer and to Woolf’s life as an artist that his resulting work sings her praises clearly while not flinching from her failures. Through the past 30-plus years of feminist literary criticism, Woolf has rightly emerged as an icon of feminism, and icons tend to be rather flat and two-dimensional; Marder uncovers the human features beneath the symbol in all of Woolf’s dignity and in her (ultimately contradictory) detail. The beauty of this biography is found in its small moments: Woolf haggles with John Lehmann, the manager of the Hogarth Press; she bickers with servant Nelly Boxall; she takes a trip to Greece with art critic Roger Fry and his wife Margery; she worries over the economic crises of 1930s England and frets whether Maynard Keynes’s warnings will sound in time to avert disaster. The ups and downs of domestic life with husband Leonard are delineated with artistic precision, as are the moments with her stubborn mother-in-law. Through it all, of course, Woolf writes, and she does so brilliantly. With judicious excerpts from her diaries and letters, as well as the words of her friends, Marder creates a breathing and multi-layered vision of a genius at work. The story ends, as it must, with Woolf’s suicide in the river; the bleak ending feels not as harsh as it might because Marder has given the reader a real sense of the woman and the causes for her untimely death.
A biography for those who love Woolf, and for those who want to love her all the more by knowing her all the better.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8014-3729-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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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