Trevelyan rightly concludes that “we cannot fail to be awed by the vastness of his aspirations.” Readers with an interest in...
The best place for Sir Walter Raleigh, the English historian A.L. Rowse once observed, was the Tower of London. This well-written life by namesake and descendant Trevelyan makes a long but engaging rebuttal.
When Raleigh died in 1618, executed, in a casebook example of double jeopardy, for crimes supposedly committed many years before, he was a deeply unpopular man. “His performance on the scaffold,” writes retired publisher Trevelyan (Rome ’44, not reviewed, etc.), “was a great piece of theater, but it is impossible not to be won over by it, as indeed were all, or nearly all, his spectators.” As a result, and thanks to his wife Bess Throckmorton’s ceaseless labors, Raleigh’s reputation was almost immediately restored, and over the next half-century or so Raleigh became a hero of the republican cause. Not that he was an antimonarchic exemplar; Trevelyan acknowledges that good Sir Walter served the Crown as it suited, though without the anti-Catholic zeal of so much of Elizabeth’s court. (“There are no such things as wars of religion,” he wisely observed, “only civil wars. The condition of man was never bettered by them.”) Raleigh, however, was also careful to look after his own interests first, and his exploits as a privateer and explorer earned him envy and infamy. Trevelyan catalogues Raleigh’s many accomplishments: he was a poet of some distinction; he was a chemist and sort-of-doctor who fitted up his cell in the Tower of London as a laboratory and concocted a cure-all called “Balsam of Guinea,” the popularity of which “lasted for the rest of the century”; he was a great soldier, sailor, and explorer, a parliamentarian and historian; and, perhaps most famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view), he introduced tobacco to England, and possibly the potato to Ireland. All signal achievements, to be sure, but not enough to save the great swashbuckler from the intrigues of the English court.
Trevelyan rightly concludes that “we cannot fail to be awed by the vastness of his aspirations.” Readers with an interest in the man and his time will find this vast account a pleasure.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7502-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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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