Striving for the lively ``composed variety'' that Hogarth said characterized his own work, this latest biography fixes the engraver and painter in his rich 18th-century milieu. Uglow, biographer of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot (1987), joins the long procession of Hogarth chroniclers and critics, from the contemporary anecdotes of Hogarth's fellow artist George Vertue to the authoritative three-volume opus of art historian Ronald Paulson. William Hogarth was 18th-century Britain's defining genius, a native artist who combined realism with caricature in representing his times. Steeped in the artist and the era alike, Uglow approaches her subject with enthusiasm and affection, though she enjoys explicating his works more than his character. Hogarth's pugnacious ambition propelled him from a humble, dull apprenticeship as a silver engraver to the most popular printmaker of his day and a turbulent life as an independent artist. His ambition endeared him to the likes of Fielding and David Garrick, but it also lost him placement as a painter in the Hanoverian court and among his more classical peers. Uglow's familiar portrait of this careerist of genius is freely embellished throughout with digressions into the environment and events that inspired him, including the multitudinous London of his ``modern moral subjects,'' the progresses of his harlot and rake; the Foundling Hospital and his groundbreaking portrait of its founder, Captain Thomas Coram; the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745; and the contentious General Election of 1754, wonderfully skewered in Hogarth's Election series. Although he may have overreached himself in later years with his tendentious treatise, The Analysis of Beauty, and his untaken bid at Old Mastery, Sigismonda, he was always a lively and entertaining figure, always bustling and skirmishing with the artistic establishment. Hogarth and his century were never dull, nor is Uglow's expansive, diverting book. (200 b&w illustrations, 14 color plates, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-17169-6
Page Count: 794
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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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