A competent academic work, by a freelance writer and scholar, on the eventful life of an energetic and outspoken intellectual and feminist of the 19th century. From early childhood, when she began studying Latin under the tutelage of her father, who was of the opinion that ``mediocrity is obscurity,'' Margaret Fuller (181050) grew into the energetic and sometimes abrasive woman who could ask her friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, ``Who would be a goody that could be a genius?'' In fact, it is partly for her connections with the Transcendentalists that Fuller is remembered, and her ideas may well have been aired beyond her own writings: In 1839, one observer noted that Emerson's lectures were ``fractions of [Bronson] Alcott, [Unitarian minister Timothy] Dwight, and ´ Miss Fuller.'' The popular and influential Conversation classes she held for women in Boston provided ideas for her writing as well as a much-needed income—income she was not receiving from the hard work she was putting in as first editor of the Dial, a philosophical and literary journal. It was for this journal that Fuller wrote the article that, in expanded form, became Woman in the Nineteenth Century, her feminist magnum opus, of which von Mehren delicately notes, ``She felt under no obligation to be strictly coherent.'' In her writings, Fuller addresses poverty and the double standard as contributing to prostitution, warns women not to enter marriages in which they would be too dependent, and argues that a woman should be able to try her hand at any occupation that appeals to her. Even when Fuller got her long-awaited chance to travel to Europe in 1847, her visits to guidebook attractions were set against the background of local poverty and political turmoil; unfortunately, this account is of the sort that offers more details on that turmoil than on Fuller's reactions to it. Von Mehren fails to capture the dynamism of her subject, who never quite emerges as a full-blooded person.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87023-941-4
Page Count: 536
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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