A good example of how focused biographical writing, when skillfully executed, can enlighten as well as a full-life biography.
Amid the outpouring of Theodore Roosevelt biographies, National Wildlife senior editor Di Silvestro (In the Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars, 2007, etc.) provides an examination focused on four years (1884–1888) of the president’s early manhood.
The author painstakingly studies the period during which Roosevelt shuttled between New York City and the sparsely populated Dakota Territory. In 1878, Roosevelt was reeling from the death of his father. Two years later he married Alice, and four years after the marriage Alice gave birth to a daughter. But Alice died at age 22, just 48 hours after the baby's birth, and Roosevelt's mother died on the same day at age 48. Desperate to escape his sorrow, Roosevelt took leave from his job as state legislator to roam the ranges of the Dakotas. He had journeyed there during 1883 to hunt wild game, and the barren, starkly beautiful land captivated him so fully that he had purchased a ranch. Di Silvestro demonstrates how Roosevelt developed the ranch to become a serious breeder and seller of cattle. Although a minor celebrity among the rancher population because of his family's prominence back East, Roosevelt managed to fit in with the permanent residents of the Dakotas. Despite his frequent journeys back to New York to participate in politics, visit his baby daughter and his supportive siblings, the hardy Dakota settlers eventually decided Roosevelt was more than just a greedy carpetbagger. As the book's subtitle indicates, Roosevelt sought “recovery” by soaking up the culture of the Dakotas, and that sought-after recovery eventually came to him. At the end of 1888, he married Edith, who could not completely replace Alice but whom he loved dearly. The author makes the case that Roosevelt's sojourns to the Dakotas imbued him with a strong sense of environmentalism, and that earth-loving ethic became a hallmark of his years in the White House.
A good example of how focused biographical writing, when skillfully executed, can enlighten as well as a full-life biography.Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1721-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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