A lot of information crammed into a few pages, but the modest thesis rings true.
Novelist and popular historian Standiford (Washington Burning: How a Frenchman’s Vision of Our Nation’s Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army, 2008, etc.) revisits the genesis of the great English writer’s most enduring book.
Also scattered through the text are stories about how December 25 became Christmas; how fir trees, greeting cards, turkeys and Santa got involved; and how Christmas transformed from a minor holiday, secondary on the Christian calendar to Easter, into the multimonth mega-holiday/shopping spree it has become. Charles Dickens (1812–70), Standiford asserts, set a-rolling down history’s hill the giant Christmas snowball we now enjoy—or endure or deplore. The author easily, graciously and repeatedly acknowledges his debt to the heavy lifting of other scholars, principally biographer Peter Ackroyd (Dickens, 1990) and indefatigable literary historian Michael Patrick Hearn (The Annotated Christmas Carol, 2003). In many instances, Standiford is summarizing, musing and generalizing, but effectively so. One major narrative thread is Dickens’s troubled childhood, which occasioned some of the greatest fiction in the English language. At the time he created A Christmas Carol (1843), however, the author’s career was slipping. Martin Chuzzlewit, still in serial, was not faring well and he was in debt and additionally burdened by supporting his improvident father. He wrote his Christmas fable in six swift weeks, and the first printing of 6,000 copies sold out in days, though the expenses of publication negated much of the author’s initial profit. Career revived, Dickens wrote four more Christmas books, all popular and all swiftly summarized here. A Christmas Carol would prove astonishingly durable, transforming into plays, films, cartoons, radio and TV shows, and an irascible Disney drake named McDuck. The author rightly focuses on the secular humanism and benevolence Dickens espoused.
A lot of information crammed into a few pages, but the modest thesis rings true.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-40578-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
SEEN & HEARD
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