Interesting reading, but Elizabeth Marsh remains in many ways an enigma.
A life whose tumultuous historical backdrop included the Seven Years War, the slave trade and globalization becomes a lens through which to view a world in motion.
Colley (History/Princeton; Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 2003, etc.) mingles history and biography in this account of the adventures of Elizabeth Marsh (1735–85). Born to a seafaring family in Portsmouth, England, Marsh moved to Menorca at age 19 with her parents and siblings. This was the beginning of a lifetime of audacious global exploration; she subsequently ventured out on transcontinental journeys to Morocco, Gibraltar, Rio de Janeiro, London, southern and eastern India and the Cape of Africa. In these places, Marsh bore witness to cultures and belief systems that were unfamiliar to most European women at the time. She bravely withstood months of captivity in Morocco, where she nearly became Sultan Sidi Muhammad’s slave. She wrote about these experiences from a female perspective in the first known English-language text about Morocco, despite the fact that publishing it, even privately, was potentially harmful to her reputation. Marsh’s story is unusual and inspiring, and Colley’s thorough descriptions of her travels, as well as the meticulous research and references to her journals, are compelling. However, while the book’s strength lies in its details, this is at times also its weakness. Striving to create an intersection of the public and private, the personal and the historical, the author too often shifts the focus from Marsh to write at length about other members of her family. As a result, it becomes difficult to get a sense of how Marsh feels during many of the changes and journeys in her life.
Interesting reading, but Elizabeth Marsh remains in many ways an enigma.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42153-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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