With skill, humor, and sound scholarship, Coote drags into the foreground a man whom history has carelessly consigned to the...
A sturdy and occasionally stirring biography of the Restoration bureaucrat and celebrated diarist Pepys (1633–1703).
Coote (Royal Survivor, 2000) rightly acknowledges Pepys’s remarkable diary as the greatest single source of information available for much of the quotidian detail of Restoration life. Pepys himself was a kind of Zelig: as a teenager he was present at the beheading of Charles I, he graduated from Cambridge, excelled at music, and became the trusted servant and secretary for naval affairs for Charles II, a member of Parliament whose speeches displayed a mastery of detail and rhetoric, a fellow of the Royal Society, an eloquent witness of the Great Fire, and a devoted fan of Restoration drama whose comments on individual productions appear in countless histories of English theater. His diary also records his more prurient interests, for Pepys, although married, was a pretty randy fellow. Barmaids, servant girls, wives of subordinates, women who happened to be near him in church—all were targets for his roving eyes and exploring hands. (Indeed, it was not until his wife caught him with his hand up the skirt of a servant that his serial adultery began to slow.) The author paints a portrait of a committed bureaucrat, a Restoration workaholic whose fierce attention to detail and mastery of the memorandum enabled him to rise in civil service until he was made responsible for the outfitting of the Royal Navy. Later, when venomous anti-Catholicism began to poison public life, Pepys literally fought for his life as determined enemies of the Catholic kings Charles II and James II sought to approximate regicide by destroying the credibility of the king’s trusted advisers with spurious charges of popery. His eyesight failing, Pepys eventually cleared his name and enjoyed a rich retirement surrounded by his beloved books and friends.
With skill, humor, and sound scholarship, Coote drags into the foreground a man whom history has carelessly consigned to the background.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-23929-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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