Although Mary Shelley’s life was fascinating, this is not the place to learn about it. The author states clearly that he is...
Most readers know Mary as Percy Shelley’s wife and the author of Frankenstein, but many critics feel her writing deserves more attention. British scholar Williams (Romantic Poetry and Revolutionary Politics, 1989) aims to tell her story and evaluate her position in the 19th-century literary canon.
Mary was the daughter of radical William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to her in 1797). Godwin proved a poor father, neglecting the child who worshipped him and later on marrying a woman she grew to detest. His home teemed with intellectual activity, however, and Mary grew up surrounded by London’s literary elite. Despite her sophistication, Mary was capable of losing her head, and the arrival in 1814 of the notorious atheist and radical Percy Shelley (not yet known as a poet) bowled the girl over entirely. She and her half-sister Claire Clairmont ran off to France with him, Shelley’s abandoned wife killed herself shortly after their return, and within three weeks Percy and Mary were married. This caused a scandal, and soon the three were back in Europe. There followed six years of what can only be called a hippie existence minus birth control (but with better writing). The Shelleys plus Byron and other friends traveled, schemed to improve the lot of man, and wrote great literature. The women bore children almost continually. The adventure ended when Shelley drowned, the friends dispersed, and Mary returned to England. She spent the next 30 years writing and working to build the reputation of her husband.
Although Mary Shelley’s life was fascinating, this is not the place to learn about it. The author states clearly that he is writing a literary life, and his narrative pauses frequently for a discussion of how Mary transformed a particular episode into fiction. There are extensive summaries of her work, along with speculations as to how each reflects the era, the various literary genres, or Mary’s personal crises. Although this works as literary criticism, readers purely interested in biography should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-22832-5
Page Count: 222
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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