Appropriately complex biography, deftly maintaining a balance of sophistication and explication.
A dense, comprehensive survey of the events in Gandhi’s life, tracing his metamorphosis from pampered child of privilege to “great soul.”
Galvanized by India's recent embrace of nuclear weaponry, so contrary to Gandhi’s teachings, Wolpert (Nehru, 1996) has set out to trace the life of this nonviolent visionary. He cogently illustrates how circumstances transformed ambitious, principled Mohandas Gandhi, son of the prime minister of a princely Indian state, into a Mahatma (an Indian term for “great soul”) who renounced all material and sensual pleasures. Beginning with Gandhi’s unlooked-for awakening in London (where he was much impressed by British traditions of law and equality), and continuing through the coalescing of his activist bent in South Africa, Wolpert quotes extensively from Gandhi’s books, articles, and letters, all of which provide a good deal of insight into his motivations. Yet a biographer can only go so far in explaining the political genius that, coupled with intense fortitude and resolve, enabled Gandhi to devise so many methods of nonviolent resistance. Something indefinable drove him to action wherever he perceived injustice—from taxes imposed on the Indian community in the Transvaal to the plight of indigo-farming peasants in India to the British occupation of the subcontinent itself (and its subsequent bloody division into the two nations of India and Pakistan). Gandhi was still working for peace, begging Hindus and Muslims to stop the massacres, when he was assassinated in 1948. Although Wolpert’s admiration for his subject is so fervent as to be occasionally distracting, this is on balance a clear-eyed chronicle of an exemplary life.
Appropriately complex biography, deftly maintaining a balance of sophistication and explication.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-513060-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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