An edifying, uncluttered, and enjoyable picture of life in Regency England.
An exhaustive biography of a clever, convivial Regency woman who was “dangerously unconventional, a character too colourful for propriety.”
In an age of enlightenment, upheaval, and revolution, Lady Anne Lindsay (1750-1825) was a prolific letter writer and a dedicated chronicler of current events. Taylor (Commander: The Life and Exploits of Britain's Greatest Frigate Captain, 2012, etc.) sifted through mountains of material at her family’s Scottish home, including her multivolume memoir. Anne charmed all who met her, and it’s easy to see how, with her upbringing in Scotland amid one of Britain’s greatest literary collections, the Bibliotheca Lindesiana. Her broad education was the product of that collection, as she and her sister read voraciously. She met the age’s most eminent thinkers, including David Hume, Alison Cockburn, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Edmund Burke. After moving to London, she found intelligent stimulation greater even than Edinburgh but without the small-town constraints. She was labeled a coquette because she was unconventional, preferring to befriend men rather than marry them. Her letters and journals are detailed, if somewhat prolix, but they give a wonderful picture of her times. She met London’s literati and politicians through her sister’s husband, who was a banker and gambler—never a good mix. It was his short selling that brought down his bank and caused one of the biggest financial crises of the century. Of all the men who wooed her, William Windham and Henry Dundas, both destined for high office, played the largest parts. When she finally married Irishman Andrew Barnard, it was Dundas who found him a position at the new colony in South Africa. Their years there were idyllic until her husband’s death, and she ably chronicled and drew the scenery and people. At the same time, she used her talents as a hostess to win over the defeated Dutch and to entertain passengers stopping on their way to India.
An edifying, uncluttered, and enjoyable picture of life in Regency England.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24817-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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