This diligently researched and masterfully written exposition will appeal to Anglophiles and fans of literary biography.
A perceptive biography that traces an author’s trajectory from disillusioned prose scribe to acclaimed poet.
American readers may be forgiven for not knowing the work of Edward Thomas (1878–1917). While lauded as one of England’s best 20th-century poets, his work has been overshadowed in the United States by that of his fellow World War I–era bards Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Yet Thomas’s life was just as dramatic and his poetry equally haunting, especially considering that he only began composing poems in the last three years of his life. A man tormented by depression, ill-suited to his marriage, aloof toward his children, and disgusted by the hack work that he had to churn out in order to earn a living, Thomas underwent a radical transformation when he met Robert Frost in 1913. Frost had moved to England in hopes of finding the success that was still eluding him back home, and he quickly fell in with Thomas’ literary circle. The two men immediately hit it off, sharing a keen understanding of the importance of cadence and rhythm to creating the mood of a poem. With Frost’s encouragement, Thomas began drafting poems that reflected his keen appreciation of nature as well as his thoughts on romantic love, rural landscapes and, increasingly, the war. By the time of his death, he had left behind a significant oeuvre, but the only poems published in his lifetime were written under a pseudonym. Poet Hollis (Ground Water, 2004), who edited a volume of Thomas’ selected poetry, expertly recreates the upheaval of English society as it made the transition from genteel post-Victorianism to brash modernism. Thomas stood poised on the dividing line between W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot and justly remains a towering figure in English poetry.
This diligently researched and masterfully written exposition will appeal to Anglophiles and fans of literary biography.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-08907-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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