A sexy story resting on a bed of comprehensive scholarship and pursued with Sherlock-ian imagination.
A noted Dickens scholar and biographer traces the story of Dickens’ relationship with young actress Nelly Ternan, an affair that has titillated Dickens fans and scholars since the mid 19th century.
Slater (Victorian Literature Emeritus/Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; The Genius of Dickens, 2011, etc.) begins and ends with recent news and headlines related to the story—the story that, as the author shows convincingly, is not likely to go away soon. The two principal questions remain: Did Dickens and Ternan have a sexual relationship? Did she deliver Dickens’ child? Slater begins by sketching Dickens’ early romantic attachments and disappointments followed by his marriage to Catherine Hogarth, a marriage that by the late 1850s was essentially over. Dickens and his wife separated, and the story spread everywhere. One early (and false) story was that Dickens had become involved with his wife’s sister. But gradually, eyes turned to Ellen “Nelly” Ternan, a young woman in a family of actors who’d met Dickens in 1857 while performing with him in a play, The Frozen Deep. She was more than two decades younger than the phenomenally popular writer. A friendship and much more ensued. As Slater proceeds, he examines the Dickens-related biographies and scholarship and journalism to show us how each work portrayed the relationship and how each little documentary discovery prompted inference and theory. (Dickens and his heirs had done much to destroy and cover up; letters and other documents disappeared in flames.) Slater is evenhanded in his assessments and has solid praise for the work of Claire Tomalin, whose book The Invisible Woman (1991) first propelled the story toward a more general audience. Slater concludes: surely sex, probably no child.
A sexy story resting on a bed of comprehensive scholarship and pursued with Sherlock-ian imagination.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-11219-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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