A somber, important complement to Charles C. Calhoun’s vibrant Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (see above).
Historian McFarland (The Brave Bostonians, 1998, etc.) paints a selective, complex, and ultimately enriching portrait of America's earliest psychological novelist in his middle years.
The narrative follows Hawthorne during nonconsecutive years over the last three decades of his life in Concord, Massachusetts. There he joined a community of such progressive kindred spirits as Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Hawthorne, born in Salem and educated at Bowdoin College (Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce were classmates), found an affordable manse there at the urging of Emerson in the summer of 1842, when the 38-year-old author of a short-story collection (Twice-Told Tales) was newly, ecstatically married to Sophia Peabody. Now Hawthorne could finally settle down to some serious writing, thus putting an end to the paralyzing, gloomy solitude of his earlier years. But it would take seven years more and penurious exile from Concord before he would return in triumph, having published The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, to inhabit Concord more or less for good. Politics intervened in 1852, in the form of the incendiary Uncle Tom's Cabin (published a few weeks before Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance), the Fugitive Slave Act, and the election of Pierce to the presidency. The impecunious Hawthorne agreed to write a biography of Pierce, then served four years as US consul to Liverpool. As the Civil War erupted and Pierce was vilified for his Southern sympathies, Hawthorne was excoriated for his loyalty. He remains an enigmatic writer, drawn to the dark, fatal forces of the human psyche (appreciated even in those pre-Freudian days), as McFarland amply illustrates in his own sometimes turgid prose. The biography’s defining premise requires jumping around and backtracking, though McFarland provides excellent historical context to solidify the gaps. Relish the rich portraits of Margaret Fuller, Horace Mann (married to one of Sophia’s sisters), and publisher/travel companion William Ticknor.
A somber, important complement to Charles C. Calhoun’s vibrant Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (see above).Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1776-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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