Small wonder that politicians, poets, and popes were after his head. McCalman opens the files on a fascinating character—a...
A lively bio of the once celebrated, but now little remembered, charlatan and troublemaker.
Australian humanities scholar McCalman, a learned student of the dark side of the Romantic era, has an excellent subject in the Sicilian count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–95), a formerly disavowed son of Palermo who has lately been honored with an alley in his name. And what better patron saint for Palermo? So asks an Italian journalist McCalman interviews. Though an “all-around flim-flam man” and “arch-deceiver,” Cagliostro had tremendous likability and undeniable charisma at his service, and with these qualities he ranged among the courts of Europe gathering acolytes and allies and expounding a weird philosophy that he called “Egyptian freemasonry,” which borrowed freely from Judaism and Islam—enough so to raise cries of heresy wherever he went. With his promises of turning base elements into gold and his habit of playing with other people’s money acquired through various exercises in faith-healing, Cagliostro got himself in trouble everywhere he went; he did time in the Bastille, incurred the considerable wrath of Catherine the Great of Russia, and wound up one of the last victims of the Roman inquisition, which saw to it that Cagliostro spent the last years of his life rotting away in prison. Cagliostro seems to have been most effective, in fact, in uniting scattered European intellectuals in a hatred of him: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for one, despised him with a burning passion, though William Blake adored him. Though surely a cad and a quack, writes McCalman, Cagliostro was honest in his own way: he “rarely made wild claims for the chemical values of his nostrums,” insisting that any cures that came to his patients were the result of divine intervention; and he was genuine in his belief that freemasonry could bring about a reconciliation of religions and governments, and with it peace.
Small wonder that politicians, poets, and popes were after his head. McCalman opens the files on a fascinating character—a con man for the ages.Pub Date: June 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-000690-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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