An unsurprising biography of one of the founding fathers of science fiction, by a specialist in French literature and culture. Lottman (The French Rothschilds, 1995, etc.) points out that the ostensibly definitive biography of Verne was written by one of Verne's relatives, Marguerite Allotte, who polished up his image with a free hand. So the reader is primed for new revelations and insights; alas, there are few if any here. Born in 1828 in the shipbuilding city of Nantes, Verne received a strict Catholic education in his youth, and was sent to Paris to study law—his father's profession. But he fell in with a Parisian literary crowd, including Alexandre Dumas, and was soon trying his hand at the sort of ephemeral comedy favored by the boulevard crowd. A popular science magazine, looking for a way to dramatize the latest discoveries, took several of his fictionalized accounts of travel to exotic places. But he had to support himself as a stockbroker until he broke into popular acclaim with Five Weeks in a Balloon—a fictional journey over the then unknown interior of Africa. While the novel shows the impact of Defoe, Fenimore Cooper, and Poe on the 33-year-old Verne, in many ways it was a clear preview of what he would do in almost all his work to come. Verne was soon writing two to three books a year, almost all tracing dramatic journeys to exotic or even imaginary places; while Lottman dutifully summarizes the plot of each, he finds little of interest to say about them beyond tracing obvious influences. In 1871, Verne moved from Paris to rural Amiens, where, despite his growing fame, he lived an increasingly hermetic life until his death early in 1905. Lottman does his best to inject a bit of drama into his subject's rather quiet life, examining every small incident he can unearth, but in the end there is little here to keep even the most dedicated Verne fan awake.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-14636-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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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