Published in Great Britain in 1990, this biography of novelist Violet Hunt by rookie book-author Hardwick, a former schoolteacher, lacks the substance and vivid detail of Barbara Belford's Violet of the same year. Born in 1862, growing up among the Pre-Raphaelites, flirting with Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin, Hunt began her series of scandalous affairs at age 20 and the first of her 17 forgotten novels (like White Rose of Weary Leaf) at age 32. Her friends included Henry James; her lovers, Somerset Maugham and, most notoriously, Ford Madox Ford, who wrote about their relationship in his fiction. Calling Hunt ``one of those women who led the way out of Victorian times into a new age,'' Hardwick admires the writer's ``determination not to accept a predetermined role,'' her attempts to expose the ``hypocrisies and confusion of her society,'' and the way she honestly portrays herself in fiction and in diaries. Unfortunately, leaden and imprecise writing (Hardwick apparently lacked access to certain papers) seem to keep the author from offering more than a fleshless biographical outline and hollow reassessments of Hunt's work. Relying too much on strings of quotes from Hunt's contemporaries, Hardwick rarely digs into her subject's psyche or into the lively literary milieu of the Edwardian London in which she lived. Too often, the reader is left wondering about the specifics. At one point, Hardwick says that Hunt ``was one of the few women who did not succeed in becoming [H.G.] Wells's mistress.'' Later, the author refers to Wells as one of Hunt's lovers. Belford, by comparison, clarified the facts—stating that in ``1906, while still seeing Maugham, James, and Bennett socially, Violet began a year long affair with H.G. Wells.'' Again and again, the reader looks to Belford's lively and extensively researched book to find out what exactly happened to the Hunt that contemporaries described as a ``brilliant,'' ``viperish-looking beauty.'' A thwarted attempt to rescue a vital Violet Hunt from the sidelines of literary history. Read the Belford instead. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-233-98639-1
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Andre Deutsch/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
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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