A capable, readable life of a man who was arguably less accomplished but inarguably more interesting than his younger...
A lively biography of Inigo Jones (1573–1652), “a proud, vain, quarrelsome hypochondriac” who, in his odd moments, designed some of England’s most famous buildings.
Not many of Jones’s buildings stand intact, allows Londoner and journalist Leapman (The World for a Shilling, not reviewed), and “many works speculatively attributed to Inigo are now thought to have been designed by others.” Still, the plan of Covent Garden and the reality of London’s Banqueting House, before which Charles I lost his head in January 1649, provide ample evidence of his brilliance as a designer and builder who improved Italianate models with his own innovations. Jones’s rise to fame and influence was unlikely, for he was born into comparative poverty, the son of a clothmaker. Yet, thanks to a sort of Head Start program put into place by Queen Elizabeth in the later stages of her reign, he was given a chance to travel to Italy, soak up some culture, and, more important, get to know the nobility. As a dedicated “young man on the make,” Jones soon came into his own as a designer of masques—elaborate and strange rituals of the rich and famous of the day, which Leapman nicely deconstructs—and as a litterateur who was the sometime friend, sometime rival of the likes of Ben Jonson and George Chapman. Considering his highly evolved toadying, it’s ironic that Jones’s most famous building should have been a “backdrop for regicide,” but Cromwell and company almost certainly did so deliberately, counterposing Jones’s classicism with their own ideas of modernity as they relieved Charles of his head. Leapman brightly writes that in this instance Jones’s “scenery, as always, but immaculate; but on this occasion he had no control over the script.”
A capable, readable life of a man who was arguably less accomplished but inarguably more interesting than his younger contemporary Christopher Wren.Pub Date: July 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7553-1002-0
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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