The facts of Theodor Geisel's life are not as well known as his illustrious works, but in this authorized biography (from Geisel's own publisher), they're nearly as exuberant. Despite the title's play on Jekyll and Hyde (Geisel loved Stevenson), the authors present a man no less entertaining and eccentric in private and in person than in public and in print. Judith (coauthor of California, not reviewed) and Neil (Westward Tilt, not reviewed) Morgan had access to their subject's unfinished autobiography and other papers, and they draw on interviews with Geisel and his collaborators to paint a clear picture of Geisel's high-spirited childhood in Illinois; his unsuccessful pursuit of a Ph.D. in English literature at Oxford; his early break in cartoons and advertising with his "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" insecticide series; and his successful switch to children's books in 1937 with And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. There are likewise modest revelations about his career (his pseudonym first appeared when the president of Dartmouth banned him from the campus humor magazine because of a bootleg gin party) and his creative personality (whimsy and ebullience mixed with perfectionism and shyness). Geisel's career took off meteorically with the convergence of demographics and technology; rebelling against Dick and Jane dullness, baby boomers exultantly devoured his fantastic yet simply written, colorfully lithographed tales. Even as a national treasure and publishing institution, he remained unpredictable, creating such bestsellers as You're Only Old Once! for grown-ups. The Morgans tell the success story well, but they neglect darker spots such as Geisel's sudden second marriage after his first wife's suicide and his his opportunistic desertion of his first publisher for the burgeoning Random House. Competent, if uninsightful, in discussing Geisel's place in American culture, the Morgans tend to heap adulation on the creator of Ooblek, the Lorax, and Sneetches.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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