A great choice for anyone who has ever wondered what life is like for the families who surround, support and are...
A look into the lives of Charles Dickens’ family, particularly the children, from former New Yorker and Knopf editor Gottlieb (Lives and Letters, 2012, etc.).
Structured in a straightforward manner, this examination of Dickens’ children is a collection of 11 narratives split into two parts. In the first part, the author examines life in and around the Dickens household through Dickens’ death. Gottlieb describes Dickens’ marriage to Catherine Hogarth, the inclusion of two of her sisters in their home, the end of the marriage and the children’s stories. Each of the 10 children receives his or her own chapter, in which the author explores their lives from birth through school. In the second part, Gottlieb picks up after Dickens’ death and follows each of the children, again in their own sections, through their often-tumultuous adult lives. Ellen Ternan plays a necessary role, prompting the removal of the children from their mother, but Gottlieb gracefully avoids making Ternan or the controversy a central focus. The author consistently betrays a desire to impress upon readers how unfairly many of his subjects were treated by their father and by history, and he makes a clear effort to showcase successes and minimize failures. However, his argument is so well put together that it’s easy to agree with him about the tremendous pressure on Dickens’ family members and how they might have fared without a famous father. Each section fits into the larger story of the Dickens family, and Gottlieb’s writing is warm and engaging throughout.
A great choice for anyone who has ever wondered what life is like for the families who surround, support and are overshadowed by great historical figures.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-29880-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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