Generally fair-minded treatment of a character with an enduring hold on the popular imagination.
A new biography of the famous French astrologer, based on many original sources.
Australian historian Wilson (Before the Flood, 2002, etc.) lists himself as a nonbeliever in astrology, thus separating this book from those written by Nostradamus’s fans and apologists. Michel de Notre Dame (1503–66), son of a christianized Jewish merchant, studied medicine at the University of Montpellier, where fellow classmates included the writer Rabelais. Astrology was at the time part of the medical curriculum, believed to offer key insights into the health of patients. Nostradamus did practice medicine, visiting several Provençal towns during outbreaks of plague. But his future lay with astrology. He published annual almanacs from 1550 until the year of his death, making observations and doing calculations well in advance. These ephemeral publications (authentic copies are rare) catapulted him into international renown. His horoscopes, offering detailed predictions of marriages, offspring, illnesses, and other important life events, were soon in demand by the rich and powerful. Examining several of these, Wilson finds many discrepancies between the predictions and the actual course of the subject’s life, although he credits Nostradamus with a number of impressive hits, such as his 1558 prediction of the early demise of French king François II, who indeed died at age 16 in 1560. Wilson notes that several original horoscopes remain in private hands and urges their study to allow a better assessment of Nostradamus’s accuracy. In his own time, despite occasional complaints about his obscurity and illegible handwriting, the astrologer appears to have generally satisfied his powerful clients. More impressively, he avoided trouble with both ecclesiastical and civil authorities in an era marked by religious strife and persecution. Most surprising of all is his posthumous prominence, with new editions of his prophecies in almost every century. Wilson does a good job of describing the historical and social context from which Nostradamus emerged.
Generally fair-minded treatment of a character with an enduring hold on the popular imagination.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31790-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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