Lags toward the end, but a persuasive study of an unusual life.
Diligently researched biography of the young woman responsible in the mid-1800s for the growth of spiritualism, sympathetically addressing her ambivalence about the practice and her legacy.
Maggie Fox (1833–93) grew up in upstate New York, birthplace of many 19th-century sects. Though Stuart (American Empress, 1995, etc.) capably chronicles this period of religious ferment, she is more concerned with Maggie herself. Fifteen when her family moved from urban Rochester to the small village of Hydesville, Maggie found life in the country boring; the author suggests that this boredom led her and younger sister Katy to create the mysterious knockings and rappings they claimed were messages from the spirits. Soon neighbors were arriving in droves to hear them. Older sister Leah, who had married and remained in Rochester, saw the commercial possibilities and invited Maggie and Katy to stay with her. In the city they acquired a large following, which grew even larger when they appeared in Philadelphia and New York. Befriended by noted journalist Horace Greeley and other distinguished citizens, the sisters became sought-after celebrities. They were dutiful and compliant as their work enriched Leah and the rest of the family, but in 1852 Maggie fell in love with Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, a noted Arctic explorer. He also professed his affection, but begged Maggie to give up spiritualism, which he thought demeaning as well as fraudulent. Stuart vividly details the course of their ill-starred romance; the lawsuits that followed Kane’s death; the consequences of Maggie’s announcement in 1888 that spiritualism was a fraud; and her subsequent addictions to alcohol and opium. Though Maggie recanted her “confession” a year later and resumed holding séances, spiritualism never fully recovered from her initial exposé. Yet its legacy endures, Stuart suggests, reflected in the current interest in New Age and neo-pagan traditions.
Lags toward the end, but a persuasive study of an unusual life.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101013-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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