A top-notch intellectual biography.
Biography of Roger Williams (1603–1683), the 17th-century rebel whose ideas led to the formation of the Rhode Island colony on the American continent.
Popular historian Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, 2004, etc.) planned to write a book about America during after World War I, with the narrative built around the role of religion in public life. But as he researched the history of church-state relations in England and America, he kept running up against Williams, who, with his wife and other Puritan refugees, sought to escape persecution for their religious beliefs. Settling in Massachusetts, however, Williams began to feel a new form of religious persecution. His evolving beliefs about the need to separate church and state, and the related need to respect the liberty of the individual, led to his expulsion from Massachusetts. Williams barely survived a snowy winter in the woods, and his journey for a spot where individual liberty could thrive led him to build a city called Providence, in what would much later become the state of Rhode Island. Barry skillfully demonstrates the physical hardships faced by Williams and his intrepid followers. He also delineates the Williams’ intellectual influences, including jurist Edward Coke and Francis Bacon, the philosopher of science. In Massachusetts, Williams simultaneously won the respect of and clashed with the colony’s governor, John Winthrop, who is more than a foil throughout the biography. Barry compares and contrasts the theological and political thought of Williams and Winthrop to emphasize the remarkably fresh, daring thinking of the Rhode Island founder.
A top-notch intellectual biography.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02305-9
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2011
A solid and worthwhile biography. (24 b&w photos)
A well-researched biography of the famed children’s author, by Financial Times critic Wullschlager (Inventing Wonderland, 1995).
Born to a poor washerwoman and a young shoemaker in tiny Odense, Denmark, in 1805, Andersen was an effeminate, unattractive boy who left home at 14 to seek fame on the stage in Copenhagen. Unsuccessful as an actor, he managed to find a wealthy patron who provided for his education and helped launch his writing career. He made little mark as an author until 1835, when he turned to the fairy tales that would ultimately bring him fame. Drawing heavily on Andersen’s diaries and correspondence, Wullschlager paints a revealing portrait: an over-sensitive and essentially child-like man who was conflicted about his ambiguous sexuality and haunted by his humble origins. Especially interesting is Andersen’s complicated relationship with his primary audience; he wrote for adults and was annoyed that the public looked upon him as a children’s author. Andersen traveled widely, and the accounts of his visits are a source of some humor (and a fair amount of insight): he was once introduced to fellow children’s author Jakob Grimm (who had never heard of him), and was received as a London houseguest by Charles Dickens (who subsequently pinned up the note, “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!”). A popular but lonely man, Andersen left his entire estate to a lifelong unrequited love, and among the hundreds who attended his funeral there was apparently not a single blood relative.
A solid and worthwhile biography. (24 b&w photos)Pub Date: May 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-45508-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sincerely funny debut memoir extolling the benefits of spontaneous escape and personal reflection.
A crestfallen 20-something techie leaves everything behind for a new life on a tropical island.
Sheshunoff’s hybrid of travelogue and anecdotal memoir embodies the dream of giving it all up to escape to paradise. This fantasy of “sitting on a small island and reading all day” was borne from a smoldering combination of a flat-lining romantic relationship and New York City burnout, exacerbated by a frustrating five-year stint at his own struggling, soul-sucking Internet startup business. Abandoning everything related to his former life in technology, Sheshunoff fled to the island of Yap (pop. 6,300, with a “growing leprosy problem”), part of the tropical Caroline Islands of the Western Pacific Ocean, and began living among the region’s indigenous citizens. “I wanted this to be one of those instances when you discover how another culture does something better,” writes the author about the shockingly weighty Yapese stone money, topless native women, and the lenient island dress code. Sheshunoff’s ensuing Micronesian education, presented with great wit and composed through easily digested chapters, is unconventional, goofy, and rife with misadventure. As his idyllic days in the sun progressed, reality seeped in, and the author began to further contemplate his situation. He began to cultivate a romance with Sarah, an American attorney who tempered his tendencies to pontificate while swimming in historic Jellyfish Lake surrounded by a vast universe of jellyfish, “six million friendly cantaloupes in pink tutus…slowly pulsing their way across [the] small, tea-colored lake.” The couple’s eventual decision to build a bungalow together on a different outer island cemented their island fling into a relationship, which included a baby monkey named Gomez. Though the chatty narrative meanders along at a beachcomber’s pace, armchair travelers won’t mind, as the author’s absurdist sense of humor validates the verbosity.
A sincerely funny debut memoir extolling the benefits of spontaneous escape and personal reflection.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-47586-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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