Shelden bases his conclusions on correspondence and archival research but often conjectures about what “must have” occurred....
How a secret love affair inflamed Herman Melville’s fiction.
Biographer Shelden (Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill, 2013, etc.) claims that Melville’s novels, including Moby-Dick, were inspired by his love for Sarah Anne Morewood, his attractive, young, married neighbor. This passionate relationship, he argues, stands as “the powerful key to unlocking his secrets,” although nearly every other Melville biographer has ignored it. Melville and Morewood met in 1850, when both were summering in the Berkshires, where she had bought property. Soon after, Melville borrowed money from his father-in-law to acquire a tract of land adjacent to the Morewoods' and moved his family from New York. There, “in the grip of his own obsession,” he wrote feverishly about an obsessed captain’s hunt for an elusive whale. The novel, Shelden argues, “is the result of the author’s own extended dive into the depths of his life.” Morewood, pretty, restless, and flirtatious, sounds like a version of Madame Bovary. Leaving her boring husband to his business, she loved hiking, parties, and champagne. The famed physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, also an admirer of hers, observed her effect on Melville. Holmes’ novel Elsie Venner, “a tale of characters searching for love and willing to do anything for it,” offered a “revealing glimpse into Melville’s secret life.” Shelden argues that Melville himself exposed the affair in Pierre, about “an idealistic youth whose life is forever changed by his romance with a dark, mysterious beauty” who claims to be his secret half sister and lures him away from his “uncomplicated” girlfriend, just as Morewood lured Melville away from his wife. The emotionally fraught novel, with its inexplicable theme of incest, proved too much for readers and ended Melville’s trajectory to fame.
Shelden bases his conclusions on correspondence and archival research but often conjectures about what “must have” occurred. Nonetheless, he offers a provocative portrait of the canonical writer and his world.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241898-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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