From the ordinary clay of words, Martin sculpts an impressive image of an extraordinary man.
Reliable, readable life of 18th-century England’s most celebrated intellectual, lexicographer, poet, critic, biographer, essayist, Tory, travel writer and—perhaps most of all—Personality.
Few writers can approach Johnson (1709–84) more surely than Martin, biographer of the Great Man’s own famous biographer (A Life of James Boswell, 2000, etc.). He does so in conventional fashion, beginning with a sketch of Johnson’s hometown, Lichfield, and ending with the funeral and burial, discussing intervening events more or less chronologically. There are few surprises. Martin does argue that Johnson was, perhaps, not so adamantine a Tory as others have portrayed him, more than once declaring that it’s unproductive and inaccurate to view Whig v. Tory as a simplistic struggle merely mirroring today’s Right v. Left. Yet he acknowledges that Johnson strongly opposed U.S. independence (famously dismissing the principal American champions of freedom as “drivers of Negroes”), accepted a pension from George III and enjoyed the honorary Oxford doctorate arranged by a grateful government when he published a pamphlet attacking the American rebels’ position on taxation. Politics aside, Martin ably shows us the enormous depths of Johnson’s humanity. He was hideously scarred by scrofula, nearly blind, subject to violent twitching that suggests Tourette’s, big and clumsy and taurine, often unkempt and always impecunious. Yet Johnson nonetheless married (with uneven result), had devoted friends (to whom he was fiercely devoted), opened his home to those in need, enjoyed the company of the famous (Joshua Reynolds, hometown buddy David Garrick) but also the unknown. He battled melancholy continually, railed against his own sometimes dilatory ways, yet when ready to work was immensely productive in a very short time, his pen flashing across the page, his mind remembering the vast libraries he’d read, his imagination soaring where few had ever gone, or ever will go, not least of all in the astonishing Dictionary.
From the ordinary clay of words, Martin sculpts an impressive image of an extraordinary man.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-674-03160-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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 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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