Well-researched, but the plodding treatment keeps this powerful, important story from soaring. (4 maps, not seen)
A doctoral dissertation recycled as a literary biography of the legendary abolitionist and feminist.
Sixty years have elapsed since the last full-length portrait of Harriet Tubman (1822–1913), and first-time author Larson must be commended for uncovering many new facts about the astonishing life of a woman once called “the Black Joan of Arc” and “the Black Moses,” a woman who knew John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, and countless others involved in the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the women’s suffrage movement. Larson’s handling of these remarkable materials, however, is unrelievedly conventional and often dull; she even fails to animate Tubman’s remarkable single encounter with fellow activist Sojourner Truth. After an introductory sketch of her subject’s life, the author returns us to antebellum Maryland, where young Harriet grew up as the property of Edward Brodess, a stereotypical white slave owner. Although an 1852 fire in the Dorchester County Courthouse destroyed key documents, Larson was nonetheless able to trace the history of Tubman and her family. Harriet fled slavery in 1849, but risked her life to return numerous times (sometimes disguised as an old man) to rescue relatives and others, some 70 people in all. She became well known on the abolitionist circuit and returned to the South when the Civil War broke out to nurse the wounded, recruit freed blacks for the Union Army, and spy for the North. Amazing success greeted all her efforts, and after the war, Tubman spent years trying to coax a pension from the government. She devoted her final years to family, public speaking, and assorted social causes; slender proceeds from early biographies helped her stay alive until she finally got her pension. Unfortunately, Larson’s artless prose never equals Tubman’s achievements, and the text often resembles what it once was—an academic assignment.
Well-researched, but the plodding treatment keeps this powerful, important story from soaring. (4 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-45627-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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