Martin (English/Princeton) brings his ranging knowledge of English Victorian life and his understanding of the poetic sensibility (Tennyson, 1980; With Friends Possessed: A Life of Edward Fitzgerald, 1985) to the subtle, obscure, introverted, and spare life and works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), the Jesuit priest whose work, published first in 1918, 29 years after his death, is considered as influential as T.S. Eliot's in initiating the modern movement in poetry. Chapter one, ``The Importance of Being Manley,'' introduces the major struggle in Hopkins's life—a strong sexuality conflicted between what his family expected of him in giving him a name he seldom used and his own homoerotic impulses, suppressed, dislocated, and ultimately projected on nature and God, producing his religiously charged sensual poetry. Educated at Oxford, Hopkins later discovered in the discipline, intellectuality, and fellowship of the Jesuit order a refuge for his quirky personality, querulous nature, and personal style of piety. His subtle and unique philosophy of ``inscape,'' a highly complex sense of identity, and ``instress,'' the thrust of energy that allows one to apprehend the unique identity of each individual, found expression in a cryptic, dense, evocative experimental poetry, manipulating syntax, diction, and rhythm to reflect his sense of himself, his world, and his very personal relationship with God. Beset by melancholy, fears of his own unworthiness, and guilt at his lack of accomplishment, he published only one, nearly inscrutable, poem during his lifetime: The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875), describing the drowning of five nuns in a shipwreck. Along with sympathy, tact, appreciation, and humor, Martin brings new information from previously unpublished sources to elucidate the shadows in which Hopkins's life and poetry had been enfolded by well-meaning friends, scholars, and the critics who have made an industry of him.
Pub Date: June 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-399-13610-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
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
SEEN & HEARD
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