A brisk narrative and sensitive insights make this book a delight.
The story of the beloved American novelist’s nearly 12 years abroad.
Peripatetic Mark Twain (1835-1910) traveled the world, beginning in 1867 with a five-month, 20,000-mile journey to 15 ports in eight countries. That adventure resulted in his first travel book, Innocents Abroad (1869), which introduced its irreverent, insouciant narrator, the American Vandal: “a brazen, unapologetic visitor to foreign lands, generally unimpressed with the local ambience—to say nothing of the local inhabitants—but ever ready to appropriate any religious or historical trinket he or she could carry off.” In this vibrant, fresh look at the venerable writer, historian Morris (Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America, 2013, etc.) traces Twain’s journeys and his evolving perspective on world politics and peoples. More than a decade after his first trip, Twain, his wife and two of their daughters embarked on a European adventure to gather material for A Tramp Abroad (1880). Despite the jaunty title, Twain found that he was no longer an American Vandal but “a well-tailored, respectable middle-aged Easterner…who now confronted European culture on his own relatively sophisticated terms.” His self-image changed more dramatically during a long journey that included India and Africa, chronicled in Following the Equator (1897). “Twain, for all his joking facade, was a keen and sensitive observer,” the author contends, “and his recent world tour had brought him face to face with the myriad horrors of power politics.” As one scholar put it, Twain saw that the “vandals have evolved into oppressors.” Returning from another trip in 1904, he joined the Anti-Imperialist League. Morris sets Twain’s travels in the context of his financial problems, family tensions and wrenching loss: He and Livy were in Europe when their beloved daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis; Livy died in Florence; and as he aged, Twain lost many dear friends.
A brisk narrative and sensitive insights make this book a delight.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0674416697
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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