Insatiable curiosity and fierce pursuit of fact combine to create a graceful exploration of worlds old and new.
Impressive if necessarily incomplete biography of a 16th-century French artist who survived both deprivation and Spanish attacks to produce stunning, controversial images of the New World.
Harvey (The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, 2000) reports that his peripatetic research into the life and work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (1533–88) was alternately exhilarating and frustrating. For nearly every shred of information about Le Moyne that the author was able to coax from history’s unyielding fingers, there were much larger pieces he could not get. Still, his discoveries are intriguing. Le Moyne sailed for Florida with a French expedition in 1564, charged with making a visual record of all they encountered. He was better at illustration than cartography, Harvey shows; Le Moyne’s fanciful map of Florida is a hoot. Even his astonishing engravings of the local Timucua Indians are controversial, as they occasionally show the Timucua practicing European methods of cultivation or brandishing weapons unknown in North America at the time. The author attributes some of these inaccuracies to Dutch engraver Theodor de Bry, whose copper-plate reproductions alone remain of Le Moyne’s Florida work. Harvey devotes much of his text to the brief but bloody Florida period, described in accounts by several survivors of the Spanish slaughter aimed at eliminating France’s tentative toehold in the New World. He then shifts focus to Le Moyne’s post-Florida career and the rediscovery of his work centuries later. The Calvinist artist fled France during a period of Catholic brutality in the 1580s and moved to the Blackfriars region of London, where he produced a lovely book of plant illustrations and served as consultant to yet another man with vast, ultimately unrealized New World visions, Sir Walter Raleigh. Harvey spends the final pages on those who rescued Le Moyne from obscurity.
Insatiable curiosity and fierce pursuit of fact combine to create a graceful exploration of worlds old and new.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6120-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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