This leviathan of a biography—the first half of a two-volume set—meticulously charts the early life and career of an erratic literary genius. Melville was born in 1819, a scion of new American gentry. Both of his grandfathers were revered Revolutionary War heroes, and both were wealthy. But in 1830 Melville's father went bankrupt and- -in an episode that provides Parker (English/Univ. of Delaware) with a dramatic opening vignette—fled New York City in disgrace, soon to die a broken man. The remaining Melvilles spent the next 20 years pursuing financial and social redemption. Through a painstaking collation of letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and other evidence, Parker sets their struggle amid a vivid panorama of the young commercial republic, with its unprecedented opportunities and huge risks. Parker concentrates on Melville's adventures as a sailor and his subsequent transformation of his experiences into prose: first, the popular South Sea adventure tales Typee and Omoo, then the novels through Moby-Dick, published in 1851. But Parker also devotes significant space to Melville's family. A particular focus is older brother Gansevoort, whose peregrinations as a Democratic party rhetorician culminated in a government position in London, whence he helped launch Herman's career. Parker closes this volume with an examination of Melville's famous friendship with Hawthorne, to whom Moby-Dick was dedicated. Parker's lifetime of Melville scholarship has eventuated in his complete mastery of detail here, a mastery that shows to great effect. His portrait of Melville lets intricacies shine like a newly cleaned painting. But while Parker outlines the passions that characterized both Melville and his times, his generally reserved tone can take the edge off of them. Indispensable for all serious Melvillians, whether professional or amateur, but given its measured approach and its heft, not a likely avenue for the uninitiated.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8018-5428-8
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
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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