Second biography of Sylvia Plath this season, this one by the editor of Ariel Ascending (1984), a collection of essays on Plath's life and work. Alexander's is a full-bodied biography, long on facts, short on criticism, but the best so far as a conventional life of the poet. Despite his detail, however, Alexander is much less involved with interpretation than Ronald Hayman is in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (p. 909), a psychocritical investigation focusing on the nature of suicide as shown in the poet's work. Hayman is more exciting, though both writers strain at supposition. Alexander carries Hayman's revisionist view of Plath's husband, poet Ted Hughes, to an even more extreme darkness, with Hughes now showing up as a craggy, violent man obsessed with horoscopes and the occult and in Plath's last year even urging her to suicide, perhaps with posthypnotic suggestion. Implied is that Plath fulfilled an agenda reinforced in her by Hughes, though of course she had an earlier history of suicide attempts. Whatever the truth of this (Hughes has never granted an interview about Plath), it's now more than a quarter century later and Hughes still finds himself pursued by his dead but restless wife in a variety of legal battles about her estate. Alexander (as Hayman did) resorts to paraphrase of Plath's work (Hughes refuses all rights to quote unless he can vet any biography), which tends to de-energize his page, but he has cracked the reserve of many Plath intimates who've not spoken before, especially about Hughes in a strange delirium attempting to strangle Plath and later deserting her outright on a vacation in Ireland when he thought he saw a face move in a painting. Alexander also uncovers a likely abortion that helped save her Fulbright. Lives of Plath are now so familiar that one reads them to see which writer can play Hamlet best. At this point, Hayman—with reservations—cuts the brightest figure, with Plath chewing more scenery than even Alexander can muster. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-81812-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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