Foot adds to his reputation as a biographer with this well-researched and skillfully presented work focusing on Wells as a socialist. According to Foot (Debts of Honour, 1981, etc.), himself a staunch socialist and former leader of Britain's Labour Party, ``this is a book about Socialism, but personalities [are] constantly allowed to intrude.'' And so they do, as the book moves through Wells's life, from his parents, whose difficult existences gave Wells his first nudge toward radicalism, to his wives and lovers, to his political and literary friends cum sparring partners. Yet what finally emerges from the interactions and influences is Wells as a complex and compelling individual who seizes ideas and charges into what he sees as the problems of his time. Foot, who regards Wells as ``an artist of the first order,'' makes a firmly sympathetic advocate, whether defending his subject from accusations of anti-Semitism and racism or arguing for the individuality of Wells's female characters. Not that he unthinkingly objects to Wells being taken to task: Young Rebecca West is introduced via her scathing review of Wells's novel Marriage, which Foot quotes in its entirety ``to show the power of the invective.'' However, when its subject can be shown to advantage, the text fairly hums with satisfaction, as when discussing the insights into early 20th century politics and society in Wells's Tono-Bungay or reporting the writer's attacks on imperialists (among them Winston Churchill). Throughout, what gives the work its shape and coherence is Wells's continuing interest in what Foot calls ``real politics, the mixture of ideas and action,'' and his role in the lively public conversation of his time. Complementing rather than supplanting existing works on Wells, this is valuable to anyone seriously interested in the writer and his works or in the history of English socialism. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-887178-04-X
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
