Ably shows a writer whose strengths were as prodigious as his weaknesses.
Balanced, highly readable biography of Sherlock Holmes’s phenomenally prolific creator, who began his career as a hardheaded physician and ended it with a daffy devotion to Spiritualism and an adamant advocacy for existence of fairies.
British nonfiction veteran Miller (Behind the Lines: The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II, 2002, etc.) reveals his subject as a talented, extraordinarily complicated man. Conan Doyle (1859–1930) wrote 54 short stories and four novels starring Sherlock Holmes. They earned a fortune but never brought him the high literary standing he craved. His publishers and public mostly tolerated his numerous other novels, histories, tracts and pamphlets—the biography deals directly with most—but they always clamored for more Holmes. Miller’s narrative is firmly traditional, beginning with family background, then proceeding from cradle to grave with pauses for cultural and social history, as well as descriptions of Conan Doyle’s work and travels. The writer had a complex love life. Married to Louisa “Touie” Hawkins in 1885, he later fell in love and established a platonic relationship with a younger woman, Jean Leckie, who virtually joined the family and assumed the role of wife-in-waiting for nine years while Touie slowly died of tuberculosis. Miller is strong on the genesis of Holmes, noting that Conan Doyle properly credited Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Dupin as an early influence. The large, stout author was also an eager athlete, a vigorous player of cricket and golf. Later in his life, he volunteered for active military duty several times but was politely turned down. The sad final section shows a deeply deluded, intransigent Conan Doyle, traveling the world to trumpet the reality of fairies and Spiritualism, committing his fortune and reputation to proving that the dead can speak to the living.
Ably shows a writer whose strengths were as prodigious as his weaknesses.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37897-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
