Cohen, the editor of Carroll's herculean correspondence, succeeds with the man's Victorian character—both the academic and the eccentric elements—but misses the point of Carroll's pointless nonsense. Although Charles Lutwidge Dodgson kept his professional life of mathematical rectitude distinct from his private friendships with little girls and Lewis Carroll's nonsense, his life has had steady interest since his death, from Victorian damage control and Freudian psychoanalytic autopsies to, most recently, Derek Hudson's lively biography and Anne Clark's more somber one. Cohen's falls somewhere between the latter two in mood, but its new research and resources are unmatched. Carroll's childhood ironically receives a sketchy characterization, despite all the details of his humorous juvenilia, mathematical precocity, and, Cohen implies, a repressed battle of wills with his father the archdeacon. Dodgson the don emerges as a solid if myriad figure—keen amateur photographer; earnest, semisuccessful lecturer; scrupulously moral deacon; writer of pamphlets and squibs; and sentimental collector of ``child-friends.'' Although Carroll's relations with Alice Liddell and her sisters have been researched almost ad nauseam, Cohen centers in on their unexplained break (the relevant pages in Carroll's diary were posthumously destroyed by his niece). Through careful sifting of later evidence, Cohen supports the idea that Carroll somehow offended Mrs. Liddell's matchmaking sensibilities. He goes on to draw inconclusive connections between his outpourings of generalized spiritual remorse and his happy times with the Liddell girls recorded in the diary. Carroll's relations with little girls in general had elements of both the elder brother and the romantic, although there is no suggestion of sexual misconduct. After drubbing outlandish interpretations of the Alice books, Cohen instead suggests biographic allegories, rites of passage for both Alice Liddell and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Cohen sees Dodgson finally as a talented, upright, melancholy figure, but does not fully integrate Carroll into this protean man. (135 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42298-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
