Obviously modeled on Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the...
Freelance journalist Kendall does his best to jazz up the quiet life of the English polymath who turned finding the right word into a science.
Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) lost his father when he was four years old, and his mother soon began to display signs of the mental instability that afflicted many of her relatives. Growing up with an anxious, smothering parent, Roget took early refuge in notebooks filled with diagrams, mathematical drawings and word lists. As Kendall too often reminds us, these feats of classification “insulated him from his turbulent emotions.” He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and became the protégé of such distinguished elders as Sir Humphry Davy and Jeremy Bentham. Though his first “Collection of English Synonyms classified and arranged” was written in 1805, the pioneering system he devised for organizing words under general, abstract concepts (“Sensation” or “Intellect,” for example) would not be published under the name “thesaurus” until 1852. Meanwhile, Roget settled in London, became a member of the Royal Society, wrote scientific articles and an esteemed treatise on physiology and enjoyed life as an eligible bachelor until marrying an affectionate, considerably younger woman in 1824. Kendall, apparently worried about maintaining reader interest during the long run-up to the publication of the Thesaurus, sprinkles his account with direct dialogue (“ ‘Dr. Roget, I’m so glad to see you,’ gushed the petite poetess”) and set pieces of dubious relevance (the Duke of Wellington’s funeral). Presumably—there are no footnotes—the quotes are drawn from the archive of personal papers dispersed by Roget’s relatives. Together with Kendall’s lame pop-psychologizing (“without this outlet, he may well have lapsed into the madness that gripped numerous family members”), they lend a lightweight tone to the biography of a substantive intellectual figure.
Obviously modeled on Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998), right down to the subtitle and the overhyped prose.Pub Date: March 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15462-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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