Wollstonecraft’s egoism was the touchstone of her work. This intelligent and well-formed study offers both a clear...
A biography of the famed author and feminist, written by British academic and editor Todd (A Wollstonecraft Anthology, not reviewed).
Pushy, excitable, proud, highly imaginative, and terrifically self-assured, Wollstonecraft moved through a remarkable range of intellectual and moral positions with the determination and tenacity that marks an authentic search for truth and self-fulfillment. The author stresses the seriousness and originality of this search, carefully tracing the elements of morality, politics, sexuality, and imagination that kept reconfiguring themselves in Wollstonecraft’s views back to her experience. This canny and articulate biography also makes it clear that the mother of modern feminism was a drama queen of no mean proportions: tactless, self-absorbed, with a capacity for complaint and reproach as inexhaustible as her energy and intellectual openness. Such a figure should and does make for a lively narrative. In addition to following her rather bizarre series of love affairs, both chaste and carnal, we see Wollstonecraft as a young governess hilariously snubbing her aristocratic employer; as a radical author in revolutionary Paris watching in horror as ever more heads rolled away from the guillotine; and as a soon-to-be-abandoned woman traveling gamely in Scandinavia, baby and seasick maid in tow, competently doing business for her lover Gilbert Imlay while at the same time writing reams of needy, reproachful, and clingy letters to him. Throughout, her life was characterized by contradictory forces of pitiful dependence and self-deception on one hand and tremendous will and self-sufficiency on the other. Especially compelling in this regard is her relationship with her sisters, whom she supported, bullied, and ignored by turns, and her famously unconventional marriage to William Godwin, who kept a separate household from her.
Wollstonecraft’s egoism was the touchstone of her work. This intelligent and well-formed study offers both a clear illustration of the source and significance of that connection and an absorbing account of the extraordinary life that engendered it.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-231-12184-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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