Thoroughly, lovingly researched, this is weakened a bit by inconsistencies of style and organization. (22 b&w...
A motley and admiring memoir of the remarkable woman known as “Anna O.” in Studies on Hysteria by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud.
Guttman (Speech, Theater and Media Studies/City Univ. of New York) has done the work demanded by her daunting subject. She visited all the relevant sites, read everything there is to read, visited every useful archive, and devoted ten years to the project. As a result, she has brought to life the amazing Bertha Pappenheim (1857–1936), who, once she emerged from her “hysteria” (exacerbated if not engendered by the illness and death of her beloved father), devoted herself with fierce intelligence and passion to a variety of feminist, Jewish, and humanitarian causes until she died of cancer on the eve of the Holocaust. Guttman could not discover much about Pappenheim’s childhood, so she picked up the story in 1880 when Bertha, who was raised in comfort in a prosperous Jewish home in Vienna, began to suffer from a variety of debilitating symptoms with no evident medical cause. The early chapters deal principally with Bertha’s profound and intimate relationship with her physician (Breuer), who was developing with Bertha the “talking cure” that would provide the foundation for the nascent field of psychotherapy. Breuer was not completely successful, so Pappenheim was confined for some time in asylums before her eventual recovery. Afterwards she never married and spent her long, productive career writing fairy tales, plays, short stories, and feminist articles, and establishing and running an important Jewish women's organization as well as a home for unwed Jewish mothers. She was a lifelong opponent of prostitution and a lifelong advocate for women’s rights. There are some problems, none mortal, with Guttman’s approach. Several times she gets wrong the titles of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works (which an admiring Pappenheim translated), she sometimes substitutes jargon for analysis, and several chapters consist entirely of translations of Pappenheim’s stories, letters, and prayers—items whose relevance to Pappenheim’s biography Guttman does not always convincingly demonstrate.
Thoroughly, lovingly researched, this is weakened a bit by inconsistencies of style and organization. (22 b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55921-285-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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