“We may come at last,” Yeats once remarked, “to think that all knowledge is biography.” Foster’s knowing, richly detailed...
Eminent Irish historian meets eminent Irish poet, continuing the massive biography begun nearly seven years ago.
Foster (History/Oxford Univ.; The Irish Story, 2002, etc.) carries on with a number of themes that occupied The Apprentice Mage (1997): William Butler Yeats’s long infatuation with the Celtic bohemian Maud Gonne, his infatuations with many other women, his researches in the psychic and paranormal, and, above all, his refusal to be easily categorized in either poetry or politics, his twin vocations. Foster begins with Yeats in turning-point 1915, when he turned 50 and was beginning to tire of life in wartime London, writing of England’s war with Germany, “It is merely the most expensive outbreak of insolence and stupidity the world has ever seen, and I give it as little of my thought as I can.” Things were no quieter in Ireland, where, soon afterward, the Easter Uprising—the subject of some of Yeats’s most memorable poems—broke out, followed by civil war and the difficult birth of the Irish Free State. Back home, Yeats positioned himself, Foster shows, not quite on the sidelines, but certainly at some distance from the sloganeers on either side, and he did not please his nominal fellow nationalists (“whose strict Sinn Féin platitudes,” Foster sniffs, “seem[ed] bathetically ill attuned to the necessities of modern compromise”) by insisting that true Irish culture owed as much to Anglo-Norman as Celtic influences. Tweaking simpler-minded politics in his “Crazy Jane” poems, Yeats goes on, in Foster’s account, to poke about in less attractive corners of politics, expressing occasional admiration for the totalitarians across the sea; but mostly, having won the Nobel Prize, he retreats, slowly, into revered and grand-old-man-of-poetry status, getting himself in more trouble on the homefront than in the public sphere. Foster wisely lets Yeats’s poetry speak for itself, though he ably deconstructs the bard’s songs in light of contemporary events, and he provides an extraordinarily thorough context for scholars of a more strictly literary bent—and all in entirely readable, deeply nuanced fashion.
“We may come at last,” Yeats once remarked, “to think that all knowledge is biography.” Foster’s knowing, richly detailed investigation is a remarkable achievement, essential to serious students of Yeats’s life and work.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-818465-4
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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