Burge’s interpretations are sound, his uses of the correspondence effective. A classic story, of course, and well worth...
New insight into the story of the definitive star-crossed lovers, drawing on a trove of recently discovered correspondence.
Neatly reversing the order in which the lovers’ names usually appear, Sunday Independent columnist Burge also pays much due to the young Heloise, hitherto considered a misguided girl once “preoccupied with erotic thoughts, who becomes eventually the sensible abbess” of history. Not quite, as an expanded epistolary relationship between the two reveals. But first Burge does a solid job of dealing with a complicated backstory, in which the handsome and near-gigantic Pierre Abelard, scion of Breton aristocracy, arrived in Paris at the age of 21 “to indulge the first great love of his life—logic.” A prizefighter of the syllogism, unafraid to come to metaphorical (and even real) blows with intellectual opponents, Abelard would meet Heloise a decade later, after he had made plenty of influential enemies, including the future saint Bernard of Clairvaux, “who willingly misinterpreted his every word and tried to spread it about that he was some kind of deranged sorcerer.” Abelard, Burge notes, was even a renowned author, whose Dialectica he likens to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, “hard to understand but a best-seller nonetheless because of its apparent promise to give the reader an insight into fundamental truth.” Heloise’s entrance onto the stage yielded tragedy in due time: after marrying and producing a child, the two separated, even as Heloise’s uncle belatedly decided to punish Abelard for his premarital affair with her. That punishment took the form of a careful, near-surgical castration that Burge describes in rather too much detail for the squeamish; Heloise was hustled into a nunnery; and a famed correspondence between the two gathered heat, as Abelard tried to shift responsibility for just about every misstep onto others and Heloise lamented the fact that “while we . . . abandoned ourselves to fornication . . . we were spared God’s severity” but were undone when the two dared follow the rules and marry.
Burge’s interpretations are sound, his uses of the correspondence effective. A classic story, of course, and well worth remembering.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-073663-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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