An exciting work of scholarship by a masterly poet.
A dense, spirited, deeply thoughtful prequel to English poet and editor Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets (1999).
Assuming that his audience is as devoted as he is to the importance of classical texts, the author argues that readers should not be “impoverished by a pragmatic sense of historical fact” and miss out on the fun of reconstructing the dauntingly inaccessible lives of the poets who created them. In his magisterial introduction, Schmidt sets out the physical evidence discovered over the millennia in papyri, tablets, amphora, and the like, then elucidates the function of scribes and libraries. “For the ancients, poetry socialized people,” he writes, emphasizing the oral tradition that dominated in Homer’s heroic age. By the fifth century b.c., the act of writing down poems already invited distortion and embellishment. In 15 chapters, Schmidt sifts through the available evidence—often elusive, sibylline, and apocryphal—and conflicting scholarship to give shape to the lives of poets as celebrated as Pindar (favored by English poets) and Apollonius (“who understands, honours and even privileges the female perspective”), as well as the more obscure Mimnermus of Colophon (“an elegist of pleasure”) and Hipponax of Ephesus (“a notable sourpuss”). The author treats two female poets, Sappho and Corinna of Tanagra (the latter may have beaten Pindar in poetry contests) while delicately acknowledging the “rebarbative” (repellent) nature of the classical male perspective, which puts off female readers and translators. Schmidt devotes three chapters to Homer and his legend, examining everything from the bard’s paternity to theories of collaborative composition and the archaeological finds that have borne out the verses’ topographical accuracy. The author has traveled to the places inhabited by these poets and endows their lives with an intimate sense of the physical landscape. Like the transmission of these texts over the ages, each of Schmidt’s chapters comment on its predecessor, and the reader willing to stick with his tireless documentation will be amply rewarded.
An exciting work of scholarship by a masterly poet.Pub Date: March 28, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41120-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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