Potter described her stories as giving “pleasure without ugliness.” The same can be said of this respectful biography.
The life of the prolific children’s author was circumscribed, even by Victorian standards.
With 40 million copies sold since its publication in 1902, The Tale of Peter Rabbit has made Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) world-famous. Dennison (Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, 2015, etc.) draws largely on Potter’s children’s stories, journals, and letters to document her personal and artistic development, resulting in a narrowly focused biography that offers little perspective beyond the subject’s own. Born into a well-to-do British family, Potter’s world “was one of conformities and prohibitions.” Raised in isolation from other children by domineering parents, her youthful companions were her brother and their many beloved pets. By the time she was a teenager, she experienced recurring illnesses and began to think of herself as an invalid. “Whether her parents were responsible for this attitude, or simply sought to manipulate it, is unclear,” Dennison writes. Intent on becoming a botanical illustrator, Potter obsessively honed her skills as an artist and naturalist, interests covered thoroughly in Linda Lear’s recent biography. Her career as a children’s author began accidentally, when she was 27, with letters to the bedridden son of one of her former governesses. She illustrated tales about Peter and three other anthropomorphic rabbits with pen-and-ink drawings that eventually made their way into her books. Her parents tried to manage her life even as she gained professional success. They disapproved of her engagement to the shy son of her publisher, who unfortunately died before they could marry; and they again disapproved when, at the age of 41, Potter accepted another man’s proposal. She defied them and seemed to live happily ever after. Throughout the book, Dennison, jarringly, compares Potter to her cutely named characters: like “Miss Matilda Pussycat,” Potter was “prone to neuralgia”; like “Hunca Munca,” her disappointment sometimes led to anger; like “Jemima Puddle-duck,” she was determined to follow her dreams.
Potter described her stories as giving “pleasure without ugliness.” The same can be said of this respectful biography.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-350-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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.
