Compared with Peter Levi's learned, insightful Tennyson (p. 1370), Thorn's life of the poet is journalistic—a series of short, anecdotal chapters devoted to tableaux or gossip—and is, despite its fast pace, out of tune with the character and achievement of his subject. The Tennyson revealed by British scholar Thorn is a popular poet whose lyrics, romances, and even his elegiac epic, In Memoriam, reflected the tastes and values of his readership. While elitist critics of the time dismissed Tennyson as childish, superficial, morbid, or sentimental, he was, Thorn emphasizes, the voice of Victorian England. On a personal level, he was haunted by his bleak and disordered childhood in a country rectory—and by drinking, madness, violence, insanity, melancholy, and an adolescence that extended until 1850, when, at age 40, he became poet laureate, married, and transformed his eccentricities— hypochondria, vulgar manners, excessive drinking and smoking, and bizarre costumes including a huge cape and wizard's hat—into something incidental and colorful. As for the gossip about his homosexuality, opium-addiction, womanizing, and epilepsy: Thorn presents it, however irrelevant, refuting some rumors and dismissing the rest as superfluous color in an already vivid life. In place of the subtle intellectual insights of Levi—the dignity of his Tennyson—Thorn offers some ``laughable bathos'' about Tennyson at home, beset by dental problems, marital rifts, and other petty problems that, the author points out, he shared with his readership. And in place of the vision, imagination, and vocation of Levi's Tennyson, Thorn refers to a ``poetic impulse'' that needed a ``kickstart.'' Levi and Thorn both recognize the disparity between the child and the man, the public and the private life—between the poetry and the person—but neither undertakes the psychological analysis that would relate them into a whole. Affable, familiar, sentimental—in fact, rather like Tennyson's worst reputation: popular, simplified, an impersonation rather than a representation. Read the Levi instead.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10414-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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