Ably directs readers back to the primary works of Thoreau and his contemporaries.
Delving into the observations of people around Thoreau, such as family, other transcendentalists and townspeople, as well as the famed writer’s works, Sims (The Story of Charlotte's Web: E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, 2011, etc.) aims to flesh out this uniquely American genius.
An ecstatic observer of nature, an admirer of the Native American ways, practical builder and idiot savant, Thoreau was both a local boy schooled in the marvels of the natural scenery of the Concord River and a Harvard-educated scholar; he was erudite yet mocked for his homespun ways. With parents who seemed to have been extremely understanding of their son’s unconventional proclivities—his father had made a good living manufacturing pencils; his mother was a vocal opponent to slavery—young Thoreau tried his hand at teaching, like his other siblings, but quit due to the fact that he could not whip the children. Tramping about with his beloved older brother, John, Thoreau also grew more intimate with the “calm and lyrical revolutionary,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had moved into Concord with his wife and family in 1835 and suggested that the young freethinker keep a journal. While Emerson had a profound effect on Thoreau, the younger man also touched the poet as having “as free & erect a mind as any I have ever met.” Their deepening understanding encouraged Emerson’s other protégés, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, to overcome their initial criticism of Thoreau’s uncouthness, and his generous mentor allowed Thoreau to live in his home and even build a shack on his newly purchased acres around Walden Pond, where Thoreau would reside for two-plus years. Building his chapters with deliberate, sometimes-tertiary detail, Sims creates a sensuous natural environment in which to appreciate his subject, as the "quirky but talented young man named Henry evolve[d] into an original and insightful writer named Thoreau."
Ably directs readers back to the primary works of Thoreau and his contemporaries.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-195-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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