An enjoyable, generously illustrated book that will stimulate readers to reconsider Gibran, his work, and his heritage.
Jean and Kahlil George Gibran chronicle the life of their famous relation in an updated—and greatly expanded—version of their 1974 book, Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World.
The authors’ subject, the Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), is unquestionably interesting, and this new edition of the book features plenty of new research and many more photographs—an important addition given that Gibran was also a visual artist. Gibran was a young boy when his father became involved in a political scandal in their home of Bsharri, Mount Lebanon. His mother took her children to Boston, where they lived in the Syrian section of town. Publisher and art photographer Fred Holland Day initially spotted Gibran’s talent for art, and he helped him learn English, sparking his interest in literature. By the age of 15, Gibran was creating illustrations for Day’s books and submitting to New York publishers. However, around the same time, he was sent back to Lebanon to study; his family feared he was too Americanized. The strong connections the authors have for their subject illustrate the deep ties of the Syrian people to their heritage. They are also excellent at explaining how the artist/writer lived a dual life: two languages, two careers, and both Arabic- and English-speaking colleagues. Gibran was lucky to find good mentors, including Day, fellow writer Josephine Peabody, and Mary Haskell, his patron. Haskell was his lifelong financial savior, but she also helped him translate his work into English while maintaining the feel of his thoughts. Gibran was always involved in groups of writers, Syrians, and politicians, and his strong feelings for his homeland were a vital part of his soul. Auguste Rodin called him the William Blake of the 20th century, and his influence is still felt today, most notably with the continued sales of The Prophet, which was published in 1923 and has never been out of print.
An enjoyable, generously illustrated book that will stimulate readers to reconsider Gibran, his work, and his heritage.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56656-085-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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