A dense work to be read in conjunction with the humanist’s own eloquent writing.
Revisiting the public and private life of the extraordinary humanist in light of religious divisions of the 16th century.
In this translated work of scholarly minutiae, French Renaissance historian and Montaigne expert Desan (Renaissance Literature and History of Culture/Univ. of Chicago; editor: The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne, 2016, etc.) asserts that readers should not ignore Michel de Montaigne’s life (1533-1592) as a public official, the details of which shed light on his lifelong literary achievement, the Essays. Indeed, Montaigne’s act of intimate literary introspection invites critics to delve into his biography, beginning with his assumption of the noble name of Montaigne for the first time in his family’s history since his wealthy merchant forebears purchased the Montaigne seigniory in Bordeaux a century before. As the first surviving son, classically educated, a magistrate by profession and then mayor of Bordeaux, like his father, Montaigne had unique ambitions of social ascension during the era of smoldering Catholic-Protestant tensions. He served several kings as well as (Protestant) Henry of Navarre, who would become Henri IV, and he conceived of his writing as history and politics, but the essays would change over time to reflect his gradual withdrawal from public life (he never became an ambassador) and adoption of the life of a gentleman author. Desan shows how Montaigne assumed the métier of a writer from 1588 onward, literally annotating his previous essays by writing in the margins and altogether inventing a new style—what Desan terms more of a memoir than essay. Would his life had been remarkable if he had not written the Essays? No. Would he have been so well-known had not a brilliant young admirer, Marie de Gournay, devoted her life to editing and publishing his evolved essays posthumously? Probably not. Desan delves into these questions and much more in a hefty biography that will appeal most to academics.
A dense work to be read in conjunction with the humanist’s own eloquent writing.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-16787-9
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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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