Nothing new or particularly compelling for Twain buffs, but an engaging account for the casual fan.
This latest addition to the overstuffed Twain library offers neither scholarly revelation nor literary insight, but instead provides a Civil War historian’s account of the author’s formative years during and after the war.
The editor of Military Heritage magazine and author of books on the Civil War and other topics from that era (The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America, 2008, etc.) might seem like an odd choice to tackle a subject who did his best to avoid that war. Yet Morris builds a solid case that it was the war that “ended Twain’s career as a riverboat pilot, occasioned his brief inglorious career as a Confederate guerilla, and (had) driven him westward across the continent.” The central theme of the book, stated more than once, is that “he had come west as Sam Clemens…He was returning east as Mark Twain—increasingly renowned journalist, lecturer, and short story writer.” The challenge for the author is that the period from 1861 to 1867 has, like the rest of Twain’s life, been exhaustively documented. Morris’s narrative relies heavily on the many books that have come before, including Twain’s autobiographical writings. Since Twain was never known to let the facts get in the way of a good yarn—even his journalism was marked by stretching the truth and outright invention—Morris attempts to set the record straight. He does a good job detailing the young man’s years in Nevada as a shareholder in ultimately worthless mines, San Francisco as a Wild West outpost and Hawaii, where Twain went surfing(!). For the reader willing to forgive the assessment that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is “in some ways (his) best book,” the Twain who emerges here is more human, less legend.
Nothing new or particularly compelling for Twain buffs, but an engaging account for the casual fan.Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9866-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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