Densely detailed and sometimes slow going, but sheds a fresh light on many aspects of Whitman’s life and career.
The poet’s relationship with his brothers, one of whom saw heavy fighting during the Civil War.
Novelist and journalist Roper (Fatal Mountaineer, 2002, etc.) takes an inside look into the Whitman family with a special focus on the war years, when Walt’s younger brother George served with the 51st New York Volunteers. The book opens with a glimpse at the family’s early life, when Walt Sr. worked as a house carpenter, building homes that the family would live in while he found a buyer. Much of that time was spent in Brooklyn, where his widow Louisa continued to live during the war. The 51st fought in 21 battles, including Antietam, Fredericksburg and the Wilderness, so the family was constantly worried about George’s welfare. His brother’s involvement was at least part of the reason Walt spent much of the war in the nation’s capital tending to wounded Union soldiers. Another reason, Roper argues, was his attraction to the young men, some of whom may well have become his sexual partners. The author buttresses his argument by reproducing lists of men’s names Whitman compiled at several points in his life and quoting from the letters the poet wrote to some of the soldiers. George rose through the ranks to become captain of his company, and the family’s concern for him was always paramount. Roper quotes extensively from letters sent back and forth; some of the correspondence between the poet and his mother provides a refreshingly unvarnished view of Walt’s character. The account of George’s career, sometimes in the words of his own letters, reveals his casual bravery and lack of military ambition. His capture and imprisonment (with most of his unit) gave Walt a burning cause in the latter days of the war: fighting Grant’s policy of refusing to exchange Confederate captives until the South released the black Union soldiers it had captured.
Densely detailed and sometimes slow going, but sheds a fresh light on many aspects of Whitman’s life and career.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1553-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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