Exhaustive and intimately connected to the English landscape, but lacking the big picture.
English biographer Barker (The Brontës, 1995) sifts tediously and joylessly through the ponderous life of the great nature poet, friend to Coleridge and later laureate of England.
Wordsworth enjoyed a good, long life (1770–1850), and other than youthful forays into revolutionary politics, he led an internally focused one among his Cumberland relatives. Barker chronicles every inch of this studious span—literally, year by year—recording the subtle evolution of a sensitive child, orphaned along with his four siblings and farmed out to Penrith relatives, into a Cambridge scholar, rambler of hill and dale and keen observer of nature, both wild and human. Rejecting a career in the church, Wordsworth decided on literature, though he was hampered by his penury; his father’s estate was mired in a lawsuit that dragged on for decades. A youthful tour abroad resulted in an explosive love affair with Annette Vallon, a French royalist counterrevolutionary with whom Wordsworth conceived a child, although the war between France and England essentially alienated the lovers for good. He shared a delicate sensibility with his younger sister Dorothy, and together they established several households in England’s Lake District, cultivating new friendships with the disciples of philosopher William Godwin and with fellow literary men/republicans Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who would fiercely champion Wordsworth’s genius. With Dorothy accompanying him on his vigorous rambles in search of the picturesque, the poet traversed much of England and the continent on foot, finding his humble subjects in peddlers and wagoners and his style in blank verse. Although Barker acknowledges Dorothy’s valuable selflessness, the biographer takes her to task for her “depth of insecurity and desperate longing for affection,” while the Great Poet himself comes off as a fuddy-duddy. As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted after meeting him, Wordsworth “paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity.”
Exhaustive and intimately connected to the English landscape, but lacking the big picture.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-078731-7
Page Count: 567
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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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