Although Collins doesn’t provide much new information, the clean, crisp narrative presents the puzzling Poe as a deeply...
The author of investigative books about literary and historical figures returns with a lean, swift life of the puzzling Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), whose life and death are as full of mystery as his famous tales.
Part of the publisher’s Icons series, Collins’ (English/Portland State Univ.; Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery, 2013, etc.) work adheres to the facts of Poe’s life and doesn’t even speculate much about Poe’s puzzling death—what was he doing in Baltimore? Why was he in the degraded condition he was in?—and avoids even commenting on some of the more bizarre conspiracy/murder theories (see John Evangelist Walsh’s Midnight Dreary, 2000). Collins begins with what, until recently, had been a tradition at the Baltimore cemetery where Poe’s remains lie: a midnight visitor on his birthday. Then the author proceeds quickly and chronologically through Poe’s life—the early death of his mother (and his father’s abandonment), his unofficial adoption by the Allans (cranky John Allan, a wealthy man, ignored Poe in his will), his boyhood years in England, his schooling (including the University of Virginia and West Point; he didn’t finish at either place), his early struggles as a writer, his battles with booze, his marriage to his 13-year-old first cousin Virginia Clemm and, of course, the composition of his famous works. Collins identifies some favorites: “Ligeia,”the three tales of ratiocination with detective C. Auguste Dupin (the forefather of Sherlock Holmes), the failed novels (one finished, one not) and “The Raven.” Collins also examines Poe’s quick trigger—he accused the puzzled and popular Longfellow of plagiarism. The author also praises Poe’s late works and spends some time on Poe’s reputation.
Although Collins doesn’t provide much new information, the clean, crisp narrative presents the puzzling Poe as a deeply troubled and toweringly talented artist.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-26187-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
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