This year's newest contribution to the Bloomsbury collection is another rather lugubrious biography of Virginia Woolf, with special attention paid to her relationships with the painter and critic Roger Fry and her artist sister, Vanessa Bell. ``How on earth does one explain madness and love in sober prose with dates attached?'' Woolf asked in her diary, while at work on her biography of Fry. Woolf's own biographers have had even more trouble with her tragic life, and Reid (English/Louisiana State Univ.) lurches with leaden pedantry through her interpretation of Woolf's unhappy family relations, Bloomsbury associations, mental illness, and artistic drive. With the biographic facts essentially known but still open to interpretation, Reid forgoes the Oedipal complex some previous biographers have attributed to Woolf's relations with her industriously literary, eminently Victorian father, Leslie Stephen. Instead, she focuses on Woolf's estrangement from her compulsively self-sacrificing and distant mother, Julia, and her sibling rivalry with her sister. Sometimes nearly villainizing Vanessa Bell, Reid casts her both as an artistic competitor and an unreliable mother- substitute, who helped take charge of Virginia during her first suicide attempt and, Reid argues, precipitated her last, successful one. Even when lengthily recounting Virginia's innocent (for Bloomsbury) but indiscreet flirtation with Vanessa's husband, Clive Bell, Reid can still rap Vanessa for insensitivity. Roger Fry displaces Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West as the central figure in Woolf's life as both friend and aesthetic cohort, illuminating the way in which Virginia took inspiration from Modernist painting for her literary experiments. Otherwise, though, Reid treats Woolf's literary drive as largely an emotional defense (against her siblings), attention-getter (with her parents), and inevitably, therapy, with all the latest ``enabling'' jargon. Despite her tracing of the more interesting theme of writing vs. painting in Woolf's life, Reid's try for psychological insight here often reads like a psychiatrist's report. (60 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-19-510195-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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