A British journalist's attempt to make an influential but enigmatic Victorian literary figure accessible to a late-20th- century audience. Thomas Carlyle was a problem for the Victorians and has remained puzzling ever since. His abrupt, moralistic style remains as opaque today as it was to contemporary critics. When readers turn to Carlyle, they find many incoherent arguments and others that strongly resemble Nazi ideology. Heffer (deputy editor of London's Daily Telegraph) acknowledges those difficulties and sets out to justify Carlyle by setting him in context. As a straightforward, readable account of his life, Moral Desperado is a success. Heffer manages to convey a sense of how this awkward, ungracious hypochondriac addressed the moral and political anxieties of the world's first industrial nation, beset with urban slums and unprecedented class conflict. When attempting to make sense of Carlyle's often repellent political views, Heffer is much less successful. It is not enough simply to assert that those who object to Carlyle's racist power-worship are failing to put his ideas in context. It was, after all, another famous Victorian, John Stuart Mill, who characterized Carlyle in context as a ``moral desperado.'' Today it is even more difficult to come to terms with a writer whose solution to what he called ``the nigger question'' was whipping. What are we to make of a writer whose works were a favorite of Adolf Hitler? What are we to think of someone who was, by his own admission, horribly cruel to his wife? Heffer does little to answer those questions, and largely ignores the scholars of Victorian literature and culture who have labored to keep Carlyle's reputation alive. In spite of Heffer's rehabilitation, Carlyle remains in his hands as much of a moral desperado today as he was in his Victorian context.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-297-81564-4
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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