A work animated by deep affection and informed by sturdy scholarship.
A gentle, concentric chronology of the English poet’s life, pausing occasionally for close—sometimes too close—discussions of poems and individual lines.
Plumly (English/Univ. of Maryland; Old Heart: Poems, 2007, etc.) brings his training, art and craft to bear on the sad case of John Keats (1795–1821), seeking to illuminate “certain connections and crossovers [that do] not fit the profile of strict biographical narrative.” Ruminating more than explicating, Plumly seeks to celebrate the verse and to illuminate the man. He visits and revisits the views of Keats’s friends and family, lovers and rivals. He interprets images of the poet made during Keats’s life, paying special attention to Charles Brown’s portrait, drawn just before consumption had begun its wasting work, and to Joseph Severn’s justly celebrated deathbed sketch of the friend he nursed during the final months in Rome. Quoting generously from Keats’s correspondence with his friends, Plumly gradually adds other portraits. Clustered around the poet were his brothers Tom, who died before him of the same disease, and George, who emigrated to America. His rival Percy Shelley invited the dying Keats to stay with him and Mary in Italy; his great friend Brown may have deliberately avoided accompanying the poet to Rome. Fanny Brawne, the great love of Keats’s final year, also comes to life here, as the author quotes from her sad letter to the poet’s sister: “All his friends have forgotten him, they have got over the first shock…They think I have done the same, but I have not got over it and never shall.” Severn emerges as the brightest hero in Keats’s darkest days. Filling out the canvas, Plumly examines the inadequacies and biases of the earliest biographies and offers educative asides on everything from tuberculosis and its treatment to 19th-century travel and Rome’s Protestant Cemetery.
A work animated by deep affection and informed by sturdy scholarship.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06573-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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