A flawed portrait that won’t replace either Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1976) or Katharine M....
An enthusiastic biography of the creator of Oz falls victim to questionable psychologizing and incomplete follow-through.
Lyman Frank Baum (1856–1919) was born near Syracuse, N.Y., in the middle of a diphtheria epidemic. Thus, argues British journalist Loncraine, a preoccupation with death hung over Baum’s childhood, compounded by the casualties of the Civil War. He nevertheless was a lively, entrepreneurial lad who wrote and printed amateur journals on a child’s printing press and later took on printing jobs for local businesses. Loncraine mines Baum’s youth for foreshadowing details—scarecrow nightmares, the yellow-hued Plank Road, a local balloonist’s antics. She also indulges in irresponsible speculation, mentioning that Baum’s father “may have” had the bodies of his four dead children disinterred and reburied. “If so, the process must have disinterred the infants in the family memory as well, and affirmed the ghostly presence of Baum’s shadow siblings.” Baum’s restlessness and enthusiasm took him through several endeavors—in the theater, as a shopkeeper, journalist and traveling salesman—and to the Dakota plains before he hit it big with children’s books after moving to Chicago. The narrative finally comes alive in the chronicle of his career, particularly the Oz books, which made him rich and then sustained him after he bankrupted himself trying to turn his creations into films (the crushing irony is gently noted). Having devoted nearly half of the book to the lead-up to his writing and particularly his purported preoccupation with child mortality, however, there is little payoff in the brief analyses of his prodigious output. Although Loncraine turns a few graceful phrases (“stories were a mixture of pure invention and ideas gathered from the cultural soup that sloshed around the author”), too often she resorts to clunky similes for effect: “He was cracking up, like a muddy hole covered in ice run over and shattered by a wagon wheel.”
A flawed portrait that won’t replace either Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1976) or Katharine M. Rogers’s L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (2002) as authoritative works of Baum scholarship.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-592-40449-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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