Bernstein’s decision to filter the broader history of the region through the prism of Hastings’ life results in a narrative...
An odd mix of conversational commentary and detailed historical documentation that presents an account of burgeoning British imperialism in India.
One might wonder how theoretical physicist, mountain climber, and science writer Bernstein (Cranks, Quarks and the Cosmos, 1992, etc.) came to write an 18th-century colonial history. His prologue informs the reader that he stumbled across Hastings’ story while reading regional history in preparation for a trip to (and a subsequent New Yorker story about) mountain climbing in Tibet. Hastings spent most of his life, from his teens on, employed by the British East India Company, rising through its ranks and finally achieving the rank of Governor-General of India. At the pinnacle of his power, he sponsored the development of the first Grammar of the Bengal Language and the first translation into English of the Bhagavadgita. After 12 years as Governor-General, however, he was recalled to Britain in disgrace to face impeachment charges for bribery, corruption, and oppression of the Indian people. The tension generated by these seemingly contradictory historical views of Hastings drives Bernstein’s narrative, which is loaded with excerpts from primary-source documents. The best sections harness these sources to present sparkling and insightful profiles of peripheral figures (such as novelist Fanny Burney). More often, however, these sources strain against the weight of anachronistic colonial and parliamentary contexts. Bernstein’s conversational prose avoids deep analysis of these complex contexts by adopting an apologist’s stance for Hastings—giving the story a novelistic (rather than a historic) feel.
Bernstein’s decision to filter the broader history of the region through the prism of Hastings’ life results in a narrative that lacks objectivity and strains beneath the weight of extensive documentation, but it is still interesting for its entertaining portraits of period figures. (21 b&w photos)Pub Date: May 19, 2000
ISBN: 1-56663-281-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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