Kelly’s immersion in the Casanova story pays off handsomely.
British biographer and cultural correspondent Kelly (Beau Brummell, 2006, etc.) fleshes out the complex 18th-century Venetian—principally known and caricatured as a serial seducer—as a significant intellectual chronicler of his age.
No biographer who takes on Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) can avoid covering the vast amount of boudoir and biological specifics the subject was only too eager to document. Kelly does not shrink from the task, but he consistently strives to put these aspects of Casanova’s character within a larger context. Not just a great lover, but a writer, diplomat and philosopher, Casanova authored more than 40 books. Certainly, the man got around as did few in his time, and rubbed shoulders (and thighs) with the great and near great. His keen eye for their mores, predilections, virtues and vices resulted in a unique cultural record of an era that the French Revolution would bring violently to a close. Noting that he undoubtedly had friends as well as lovers who went to the guillotine during the Terror, Kelly notes, “In this new testament for the modern world, Giacomo Casanova cast himself as messiah and lead actor, lover, sex-god and principal protagonist but also as lead fall-guy, comedian, fraudster, grifter and dupe.” Born to a popular actress (and probably not fathered by her husband), Casanova grew to need the rich and the titled because he was neither, yet he always felt destined for the undeserved lifestyle he largely enjoyed. Kelly acknowledges the inaccuracies and exaggerations that populate Casanova’s memoirs—thousands of extant manuscript pages were not sorted and published in French (the language he chose to write in) until 1960. The author adds that historians eventually corroborated much that critics initially disputed.
Kelly’s immersion in the Casanova story pays off handsomely.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58542-658-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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
SEEN & HEARD
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