A meticulously researched, lucidly presented, but oddly undramatic life of English literature’s elusive icon. Bardolaters hoping for more speculation about the Dark Lady’s identity or adventurous hypotheses of the “missing years” before London will get a refreshing cold shower from this up-to-date, strictly factual life. Veteran British biographer Honan (professor emeritus of English at the University of Leeds; Jane Austen, 1988, etc.) pitches in with Shakespearean studies’ slow work to overturn the romantic tide of mythologizing, garbled oral tradition, and basic errors surrounding the poet ever since Aubrey’s gossipy anecdotography in his Restoration-era Brief Lives. With the current accumulation of unearthed Elizabethan documents, Honan’s work has a solid footing in the era. Mapping out Shakespeare’s post-Reformation Stratford, the author analyzes both his father’s business and civic affairs, his family’s ties to recusant Midlands Catholics, and his mother’s and wife’s personalities—at least as far as can be inferred from official documents such as wills. Honan also goes into detail about a grammar school education (and how it would have formed the basis of Shakespeare’s tutelage) before he suggests that Will left to become something like a teacher-cum-actor in Lancashire (if “William Shakeshafte,” in the employ of Alexander de Hoghton, is indeed the Bard). Picking up his trail in London, Honan’s treatment of Shakespeare’s career in the tumultuous Elizabethan theater is grounded in documentary evidence wherever possible, with suppositions about Shakespeare’s attitudes to his fellow actors and contemporary tastes (such as for child actors) always carefully qualified. By the end, although Honan is impartial about the dogmatic conflicts of Shakespeare’s times, he does not approach the final question of Shakespeare’s personal religious convictions—as Aubrey noted, he was accused of having “died a papist.” Still, this life objectively scrutinizes the public individual rather than the inner man. Synthesizing current scholarship, Honan is as likely to quote from official documents, from church records and business papers, or from law court testimonies, as from Shakespeare’s works for his portrait. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-811792-2
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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