An absorbing true story of sexual intrigue, legal battles, filial piety, and social history in 16th-century Germany. Ozment (History/Harvard, Protestants, 1992) recreates the fascinating confrontation between a respected bÅrgermeister and his free-spirited daughter. Hermann BÅschler was a wealthy councilman in the southern German city of Schwabisch Hall. His daughter Anna provoked his wrath and that of the town with her flirtatious and scandalous behavior; in particular, she juggled affairs with two men, one a Jew. When her father discovered Anna's cache of love letters, he resolved to disown her. Anna, in turn, charged that her father was negligent in contracting a proper marriage for her and insisted on claiming her inheritance. So began a battle that lasted over 25 years. The tale unfolds within the context of a Germany driven by the Protestant Reformation, recovering from periodic recurrences of the Black Death, and struggling to confront the overwhelming issues of the early modern age. Ozment, utilizing Anna's love letters and surviving court documents, weaves a complex human story of the woman, her lovers, and her family. No less important as characters are the townspeople, who see Anna as transgressing time-honored norms of filial and sexual behavior. Successfully disowned by her father, an outcast in the community, Anna spent the remainder of her life in a fruitless effort to recover her inhertitance. Ozment clearly examines how Anna's case reflects issues of class and gender, and concludes that ``in that distant age, as in our own, rationality and madness accompanied one another, the one as prominent and real as the other.'' Less convincingly, the author argues that Anna's story reveals that women were not ``powerless victims of male rule,'' but able to define themselves and ``leave their mark on history.'' Undoubtedly, though, the situation of women was more complex than previously thought, and this riveting drama of an ambiguous heroine sheds light on that bygone age. (illustrations, not seen) (History Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: March 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13939-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
