More encomium than biography, Levi’s work traces the great Roman poet’s inspirations and influences backward and forward through time, via close readings of classical and modern texts. Though not an introduction, this rich analysis offers bountiful insights to anyone already familiar with the Aeneid and the poet’s early works. Granted, personal information about Publius Vergilius Maro is difficult to come by—only two ancient biographies exist, both just a few pages long. Thus, Levi, the biographer of Tennyson, Horace, and Edward Lear, weaves together historical analysis, gossip, and close readings of the poet’s oeuvre to infer a portrait of the poet. Springing from the Greek Homeric tradition of the Odyssey, Virgil created a new kind of hero in Aeneas: mythic, but also bound by human dilemmas. Levi does an excellent job of teasing out Virgil’s struggles with Homeric traditions of mythology and composition, and melding them with contemporary Roman experience under the rule of Augustus, who commissioned the Aeneid (Virgil also had another wealthy patron to thank for a comfortable living). Levi traces the poet’s relationships with authors such as Horace, whom he knew personally, and others he had most certainly read, such as Lucretius and Cicero. Though most classical linguists would argue with this biographer’s preference for the Dryden translation, Levi’s poetical analysis is instrumental as he guides us through each episode of the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, illuminating his favorite passages and dismissing others. Like Virgil, Levi packs some paragraphs so densely that in parts he will lose any but the most attentive readers. Such care is rewarded, however. What shines through is Levi’s love of Virgil and a lifetime of rumination and analysis. The biography label may be ill-fitting, but Levi’s textual explications are the next best thing to his course at Oxford.
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19352-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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