Walsh, novelist (The Man Who Buried Jesus, 1989) and literary detective (Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1988, etc.), now brings his impressive speculative powers to bear on the scandals surrounding the closing years of Emily Dickinson's life. The critical year was 1883: Emily's beloved eight-year-old nephew died; 70-year-old Judge Otis Lord, whom Emily hoped to marry, suffered a fatal stroke; failing health confined her to her room; she lost hope of publishing her poems; and her brother, Austin, entered a mÇnage Ö trois with Mabel Todd and her husband, David (who later suffered a nervous collapse from their irregular lifestyle). According to Walsh, Emily, influenced by Romeo and Heathcliff, then committed suicide by strychnine ingestion. Susan Dickinson, the poet's sister-in-law, discouraged posthumous publication of Emily's poems to avoid attracting attention to the sordid living arrangements of the mÇnage, but Vinnie, the poet's sister, asked Mabel to copy them, with Mabel's name ultimately joining Colonel Higginson's as editor and friend of the poet, even though she had never been allowed in Emily's presence. In 1930, when Emily's poetry was rediscovered, Mabel, as the only survivor, become the source of biographical information, which she altered to establish her own reputation as expert and confidante. Her daughter Millicent published Ancestor's Brocade: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson, permanently establishing Mabel as a literary heroine and Susan Dickinson and Vinnie, who had challenged Mabel's claim to a piece of Emily's property, as villains. It is difficult to say how much of this story is true. Mostly, it has the quality of a fascinating piece of historical fiction—in part because of Walsh's emphasis on the sordid (Austin was allowed ``a place in the family bed,'' and David was allegedly allowed to watch Austin and Mabel making love on Sunday evenings), and his neglect of precise citations, referring to other biographers without naming them or the works he claims to be refuting.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1119-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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