Thoreau emerges from this admiring portrait as a man richly connected to the cosmos.
A sympathetic biography of the famed 19th-century transcendentalist.
Commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), historian and naturalist Dann (Lewis Creek Lost and Found, 2001, etc.) offers a reappraisal of the writer’s life, focusing on Thoreau’s connection to, and celebration of, the invisible and ineffable. To support his analysis, Dann draws largely from Thoreau’s journals, letters, and published writings as well as a three-volume work by Emerson scholar Kenneth Walter Cameron, Transcendentalists and Minerva: Cultural Backgrounds of the American Renaissance with Fresh Discoveries in the Intellectual Climate of Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau (1958), one of the few secondary sources he references. Dann does not differ from other biographers who examine Thoreau’s self-description as a mystic, but he underscores the significance of mysticism, pantheism, and empathy to the writer’s personality and life choices. Based on Thoreau’s admiration for Sir Walter Raleigh and Raleigh’s “esteem for astrology,” Dann asserts that Thoreau “was convinced that the stars played down into human life.” Thoreau articulated “his sense of his own personal destiny” by using “the language of the stars” and believed in a personal guiding star. Dann explains Thoreau’s depression in 1852 as caused by “a planetary configuration called the black moon." Dann also asserts that Thoreau was attuned to “the ways of the faerie world,” although he revealed his encounters with faeries in “an understated, cryptic form of reporting” so as not to incite his contemporaries’ derision. Although Thoreau thought mesmerism and spiritualism were “idiotic,” he was fascinated by the “invisible fluid” that formed the basis of popular vitalist theories. Despite proclaiming “repugnance for the Church,” Thoreau, Dann believes, “identified with Christ the fellow heretic.” Because he privileges Thoreau’s reveries over his philosophical and political grounding, Dann’s argument at times seems insistent rather than persuasive, but this should appeal to readers interested in Thoreau’s more esoteric beliefs.
Thoreau emerges from this admiring portrait as a man richly connected to the cosmos.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-18466-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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