Warren (English/Queens College) performs a true literary service here by re-creating the life of America's first female newspaper columnist—a witty, brave, and defiant writer whose life proves both inspirational and heartening even now. Born in 1811 in Maine as Sarah Payson Willis Parton (``Fanny Fern'' was a pen name), Fern was raised in Boston in strictest Calvinist fashion by a severely religious father and a more spirited and humorous mother. Stumbling into the best education then available for American women, at the Hartford Female Seminary, Fern returned home after graduation to learn what she ironically dubbed the ``Lost Arts'' of ``bread-making and button-hole stitching.'' Married at 25, she bore three children and looked forward to a happy, traditional middle-class life—but was dealt a major blow when early widowhood, a disastrous second marriage that she felt compelled to end, and the resulting loss of reputation and income left her a destitute, virtually friendless single mother. It was the desperate need to earn money that prompted Fern, now 40, to try her hand as a writer. Her witty, astonishingly frank satirical essays on life as a 19th-century female caught on instantly with readers, leading to a highly paid newspaper column, a bestselling novel, and several adult and children's books—all written under the Fanny Fern pseudonym. Triumph in her career and a third, happy marriage failed to erase Fern's memories of poverty and discrimination, though, and she became an eloquent activist for women's rights, tussling, in her heroic-female fiction and her tart and amusing essays, with issues of fairness and equality until her dying day. Dismissed as a ``sentimentalist'' by 20th-century male critics, Fern, claims Warren, was the most threatening and aggressively feminine writer of 19th-century America. Fern's experiences, evoked here in lively and engaging prose, should provide inspiration for those who follow. (Twenty-one b&w illustrations.)
Pub Date: April 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-8135-1763-X
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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
SEEN & HEARD
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