At age 44, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, third child of Nathaniel Hawthorne, left her husband and a minor writing career to become a nun and care for poor people dying of cancer in an age that considered the disease to be communicable. Already the subject of three religious biographies, Valenti's book claims to offer Rose a secular and cultural setting and makes an attempt to account for her evolution. Born in 1851, Rose gained a sense of strangeness from her odd relations with her siblings and parents, their constantly moving about from Massachusetts to England, Rome, Germany, their illnesses, losses, and quarrels, until finally, orphaned at age 20, she married the talented and devoted writer. George Lathrop, who adored her, encouraged her to write, and helped to edit her father's letters. It was his manuscripts—the questions of who owned them and what was to be done with them—that alienated her from her siblings in her adult life, isolating her from her family during the terrible loss of her child at age five to diphtheria and the severe emotional collapse that followed. Attracted to the social mission of the Roman Catholic Church and its ``feminization'' in the Victorian period, she converted in 1891, along with her husband, then inexplicably sought a forbidden divorce. Rose left her husband , who later died ill and alone, and founded a community on the Lower East Side of New York called Servants for Relief of Incurable Cancer, offering shelter to patients she solicited through newspaper ads with funds from her high-minded friends and from the sale of her father's memoirs. Valenti (Communicative Arts/Pembroke State) brings little insight, depth, or understanding to this fascinating personality, mysteriously driven to live out the pathology of her father's gothic tales. Her own revealing poetry and stories deserve more than the superficial commentary Valenti offers. The story of Rose- -indeed the posthumous life of Hawthorne himself—is yet to be meaningfully told.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1991
ISBN: 0-8071-1612-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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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