These stylistic tics, along with strained comparisons with the subjects of Callow’s other biographies, suggest that the...
Another literary biography from an English novelist who has taken on Chekhov, Lawrence, and Whitman in the past.
Callow (Chekhov, 1998, etc.) tracks the Scotsman’s peregrinations through Britain, Europe, the US, and the South Seas, and he is concerned with the character of the man rather than sources or significance of his work. Stevenson’s stiff but devoted father Thomas gets a good deal of attention, as does his strong-willed, erratic American wife Fanny Osbourne Stevenson, who alienated most (though not all) of the writer’s literary pals in London. This is clearly a labor of love, and the reader cannot help but share the biographer’s fascination with the vagaries of this peripatetic, sickly rebel, his unexpected toughness, and his uncanny charm; but, as Callow points out in his preface, there has been no dearth of Stevenson biographies, and the point of this particular contribution is, to put it charitably, difficult to fathom. He claims to be debunking the myth that surrounds his subject—without clearly stating just what that myth consists of—yet most of his commentary is in fact directed at defending RLS from his detractors and caviling at his critics (notably Bruce Chatwin, whose motivations regarding Stevenson are dissected more effectively than any of Stevenson’s own decisions). Even more confusing than his approach to his subject is his attitude toward his readers. Callow avers that his study is meant for “the intelligent reader with no specialized knowledge,” yet he alludes to events in Stevenson’s life and often quite obscure people in his circle as though they were already familiar. Knowledgeable RLS students will find no new information and very little in the way of a coherent, original perspective on the man; newcomers to Stevenson will get no introduction either to his work or to the world of Victorian letters and manners from which he was in constant flight. The tone veers irritatingly between scholarly journalism, popular biography, and belle-lettristic musing; his sentences and paragraphs on the other hand are consistently packed with redundancies and non sequiturs.
These stylistic tics, along with strained comparisons with the subjects of Callow’s other biographies, suggest that the author is addressing no audience other than himself.Pub Date: April 6, 2001
ISBN: 1-56663-343-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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