A well-wrought life of an eminent Victorian who merits our broader acquaintance.
“They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon”: spirited biography of the often dispirited master of the nonsense rhyme.
Remembered mostly as a writer of limericks, a poetic form he made his own, and other frivolities, Edward Lear (1812-1888) had a much broader range: In the Victorian era, ushered in when he was still a teenager, he was widely regarded as an illustrator and, moreover, as a scientific illustrator with a particular gift for painting birds. According to British biographer and historian Uglow (In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815, 2015, etc.), he was also “an intelligent, self-aware depressive” who battled the black dog of melancholy during his long and productive life. Depression aside, Lear was the kind of man who threw himself into projects: He knew everyone who was anyone, teaming up with Tennyson for adventures and working off a considerable head of steam by writing. “Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils,” Lear confessed, but he was capable of much considerable seriousness as well. Throughout the book, Uglow turns up wonderful moments, as when Lear set to work contributing to the “great visual filing system” devised for a scientific collection assembled by the retiring Lord Derby and when he met with Queen Victoria a few times in order to teach her, at her request, how to draw: “A diligent pupil, she copied Lear’s drawing and he, hardly surprisingly, was pleased and encouraging.” Apart from the workhorse Uglow chronicles, Lear was also a peripatetic man of broad interests who seemed, at least outwardly, cheerful. He was, in short, a Victorian man of many parts: a scientist, artist, writer, and spiritual searcher who struggled to overcome what, in one of his “darkest negatives,” he called the condition of being “blank.”
A well-wrought life of an eminent Victorian who merits our broader acquaintance.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-11333-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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