A revealing portrait of a unique talent, a deeply religious artist who saw God’s wonder and mystery in all.
The intensely private, pious, sometimes melancholic and tortured life of the English Jesuit whose remarkable poems did not appear until a quarter-century after his death.
Mariani (English/Boston Coll.; Death and Transfigurations, 2005, etc.) employs the present tense throughout, no doubt to lend immediacy to the introspective Hopkins (1844–89), who broke, then reconciled with his moderate Church of England family to become a Jesuit priest devoted to the classics and to disciplined adherence to his vows. Using the poet’s journal, meditations, sermons and copious correspondence with friends and family as well as his verse, Mariani depicts Hopkins as a revolutionary poet who pioneered the use of sprung rhythm and used the natural world to inform his life, his preaching and his art. The diminutive Jesuit was a vigorous hiker, a voracious reader and a curiously asexual man, though he reportedly stopped a Latin class late in life to inform the surprised (and certainly delighted) students that he’d never seen a naked woman—but wished he had. Beginning in 1866 with the young Hopkins agonizing over his conversion, the narrative then circles back to his birth and proceeds in fairly conventional chronological fashion, each chapter covering a few years. The author takes us through Hopkins’s undergraduate years at Oxford, his Jesuit training and various positions within the order, including his final appointment as a professor of classics in Dublin, where he battled melancholy and failing health, writing friends frequently to complain about the onerous burden of marking student exams. Mariani stops periodically to consider in detail—and with considerable insight—the poems Hopkins was composing at that particular moment.
A revealing portrait of a unique talent, a deeply religious artist who saw God’s wonder and mystery in all.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-02031-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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