A modest yet welcome addition to the literature surrounding the German world traveler and his extraordinary accomplishments.
A brief life of the influential scientist and explorer, the most renowned of his day.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth, which explains the arrival of Andrea Wulf and Lillian Melcher’s entertaining graphic book The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt (2019), building on Wulf’s earlier Invention of Nature (2015). This comparatively slender life by Times Literary Supplement editor Meinhardt adds only a little materially to the facts surrounding the explorer and polymath. What it does successfully is place him not so much in the tradition of the ongoing Enlightenment as at the vanguard of the romantic movement, blending art and science as an exaltation of the human mind. “In each part of the world,” writes the author, Humboldt “stressed, nature had its own, distinctive character, and the very thing that was singular about it eluded the power of comparison.” In other words, the world is made up of distinctive entities rather than great forces, individuals acting rather than the grinding of the Hegelian dialectic, all susceptible to sentiment and sensation but hard to describe, requiring the poet as much as the practitioner of the dawning scientific method. Small wonder that, later in life, Humboldt wrote not just of the places he saw as he traveled around the world, but also of “the moral disposition of Humanity” as he encountered it. Meinhardt also adds a little sizzle to the steak with her suggestion that Humboldt was likely not ascetic in matters corporeal, as evidenced by his attachment to a 22-year-old Ecuadorian named Carlos Montúfar: “There were rumors that the association was not merely scientific," she writes with nice circumspection. Wulf’s is the more comprehensive book, but Meinhardt delivers a useful commentary on Humboldt and his age.
A modest yet welcome addition to the literature surrounding the German world traveler and his extraordinary accomplishments.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62919-019-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: BlueBridge
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© 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.
