Much scholarly vigor, very little animating vim. (46 illustrations)
The childhood, youth, and education of Victoria, from cradle to coronation eve (1819–37).
Vallone (English/Texas A&M) has done her homework: she examined young Victoria’s journals, schoolwork, creative writing, sketches, and “Behaviour Books”—accounts of her conduct kept by her influential governess, Louise Lehzen; and she inspected the toys and prized possessions of the princess. She read (and here summarizes) the books that Victoria read—those assigned to her by family and tutors as well as those the princess read for her own edification and pleasure (including James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo and Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation). Vallone consulted books from the period dealing with child-rearing and the deportment of girls. She examined the many portraits of young Victoria, both for their accuracy and for their symbolic values. She explored the curriculum Victoria experienced—her studies of Latin, French, German, and Italian (her weakest language) and of history, literature, science, and mathematics. (Victoria, in Vallone’s view, was “an able student with an active mind.”) She explains Victoria’s interests in riding, theater-going, singing, and dancing and presents intimate aspects of Victoria’s life as well, describing her childhood willfulness, speculating about her menstrual cycle, and describing her initial encounters with her cousin Albert, who would become the love of her life. Emerging from all of this impressive research is a much more human and even humane Victoria than suggested by the later photographs of the dour, dumpy queen. The Victoria that Vallone reveals is a young woman with spirit—and a temper—with an education both unusual and conventional, and with a sympathy for the poor. By the time her uncle William IV died, Victoria was a competent and caring young woman ready for the role history had so improbably awarded her. Though her scholarship is impeccable, Vallone lacks any irony or humor and sometimes over-stuffs her copious parentheses; occasionally, she sacrifices freshness for familiarity (people tend to “pull punches” and “play a waiting game”).
Much scholarly vigor, very little animating vim. (46 illustrations)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-300-08950-3
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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