A beautifully written life of India's once-famous Nobel laureate who is now largely unknown to Western readers. In the first half of the 20th century, Rabindranath Tagore (18611941) was widely known in the West as a mediator between Eastern and Western culture. His poems, plays, paintings, and music remain enormously influential in India, especially in Bengal. Dutta, a Calcutta-born teacher now living in England, and Robinson, literary editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, assume that Western readers need a complete reintroduction to Tagore. The result is a leisurely, life-and-times biography written from a detached, objective point of view and full of useful explanatory detail. Dutta and Robinson balance the cultural, political, family, and religious influences on Tagore without settling on any one as predominant. Because Tagore participated in so many aspects of Indian politics and literary culture, and knew so many key figures not only in India but in the West, his biography serves as an introduction to basic features of modern Indian history and culture. Although usually deferential to his point of view, the authors are also sensitive to Tagore's contradictions. A beneficiary of British rule, he agonized over the plight of peasants on his family estates but never questioned the legitimacy of private ownership. He supported British rule until the national movement made it unfashionable. After embracing nationalism, he distanced himself, not only from violent extremists, but from political mainstreamers such as Gandhi. The book becomes livelier when the authors lose patience with Tagore, particularly over his hypocrisy in advocating rights for women that he never extended to the women of his own family. As many-sided as Tagore himself, this biography will introduce readers not only to one of the giants of 20th-century literature, but also to the encounter between European and South Asian culture under colonial rule. (48 pages photos)
Pub Date: Dec. 4, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-14030-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
