An uncritical but colorful picture of a offbeat character who convinced many that he was a genius.
Stage-magic historian Steinmeyer (Art and Artifice: And Other Essays of Illusion, 2006, etc.) examines the quirky life of Charles Fort (1874–1932).
Fort’s books, writes Steinmeyer, are filled with “data that Science has excluded,” and laid the groundwork for modern science fiction as well as belief in the paranormal, alien abductions and other quasi-supernatural phenomena. Fort grew up in Albany, left an abusive home early and nearly starved in New York City before discovering a talent for fiction. Between 1900 and 1920 he wrote short stories to scrape by, attracting enthusiastic support from Theodore Dreiser (then better known as a magazine editor than a novelist). Despite Dreiser’s influence, Fort remained on the edge of poverty, and his only novel flopped. Always fascinated by weird events, he began spending days at the public library, poring through books and journals. In 1919 Dreiser persuaded his publisher to bring out Fort’s first collection of oddities, The Book of the Damned; it turned out to be mildly successful, and three more followed. All listed myriad marvels: blood or frogs raining from the sky, ghosts, UFOs, talking animals, telepathy, etc. Fort was no skeptic; if someone witnessed a corpse return to life, he wrote it down. He had no overall philosophy except to ridicule the authority of science and, more occasionally, religion. Since scientists quarreled, disagreed and were sometimes wrong, he assumed that one theory was as good as another, and paranormal events as likely as any others. Clearly an admirer, Steinmeyer avers that Fort’s writing foreshadowed a respectable philosophical school that asserts that all truth is relative. The biographer shows little interest in pointing out that Fort’s implausible anecdotes remain implausible today, or that his disbelief in such scientific triumphs as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics hasn’t held up.
An uncritical but colorful picture of a offbeat character who convinced many that he was a genius.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58542-640-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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