Roe’s biography acutely displays the intensity, anguish and triumph of a great life for whom the clock was always ticking.
Roe (English/Univ. of St. Andrews; Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt, 2005, etc.) delivers a tightly focused and highly useful biography of the great English Romantic.
Born to a family with a history of health problems, fatherless at an early age and trained for a career in medicine, John Keats (1795–1821) pursued poetry with a faith in his own genius and a well-founded fear that he would not live long enough to fulfill it. He was ambitious from the beginning, modeling himself on Spenser and Shakespeare, testing himself with lengthy epics like Endymion, and fully aware that the competition was fierce, with all of the High Romantic poets writing at the same time. Roe’s Keats is both sensitive and hotheaded, naturally gifted but also constantly pushing himself to the next level. He was a frustrated young man too: by what he hadn’t experienced, by his unconsummated passion for his fiancee, and by the slow, wasting deterioration of his final years. Roe quotes and examines the poetry at length, and he is especially attentive to determining how a talented but immature poet blossomed into a great one. He also ventures an intriguing analysis of why Keats’ poetry received such harsh criticism in its day: The vernacular style represented by the so-called “Cockney School of Poetry” was a threat not just to the classical style, but the social order.
Roe’s biography acutely displays the intensity, anguish and triumph of a great life for whom the clock was always ticking.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-12465-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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