An engaging account of the pain of anonymity in the presence of selfish genius.
A meticulously researched retelling of the tumult of the early 19th century through the most tumultuous family of them all.
Despite the countless chronicles written about the lives and times—and primarily, the scandals—of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley family, Todd (Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation, 2004, etc.) unearths yet another in this story of the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s eldest daughter Fanny, who committed suicide at the age of 22. Born out of wedlock to Wollstonecraft and the American cad Gilbert Imlay, Fanny was just three years old when her beloved mother died giving birth to her half-sister Mary, who would become famous both as the author of Frankenstein and for her elopement with the fatally attractive Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was just 16. Shortly after Wollstonecraft’s early death, her husband, the famed political writer William Godwin, published a biography in which every detail of Wollstonecraft’s sexual indiscretions (including those with him) were laid bare, dooming Fanny to life as a known bastard. But Fanny’s real tragedy, it seemed, was to be the dull one in a family toward whose society everyone in the known world was irresistibly drawn, from Shelley to Lord Byron to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Aaron Burr. In a family of writers, she alone seemed to lack facility with the pen, and, while her half- and step-sisters engaged in scandalous sexual adventures, Fanny was kept duty-bound at home. Because so little is known about the melancholy young woman, Todd is forced to speculate on several key points—for example, what exactly caused her to commit her final act—but she wisely structures the narrative like a mystery, finely drawing out the tension until the end. Fanny remains largely an excuse to tell the story, and the anonymous suicide who was buried in a pauper’s grave remains a cipher.
An engaging account of the pain of anonymity in the presence of selfish genius.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58243-339-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
