The biography of a turn-of-the-20th-century author whose now forgotten mystical and romantic novels were bestsellers in England and around the world until WWII. According to Ransom (Fanny Trollope, not reviewed), the world-famous Marie Corelli may not have been Corelli at all, but Mary Mills or perhaps Minnie Mackay, the adopted or illegitimate daughter of journalist Charles Mackay, himself a well-known figure in 19th-century England. Then again, she may have been his granddaughter. Or left on his doorstep “one snowy winter’s night.” Whatever her true lineage, she set out to be “somebody” and succeeded. Her 31 novels and assorted articles, booklets, and speeches were almost always blasted by critics and embraced by readers and audiences. The extraordinarily healthy sales of her books should also be judged against her contemporaries: H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde. Her fans included Queen Victoria, who requested that all of Corelli’s books be sent to her, and her friend the Prince of Wales. Her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, was accepted for publication in 1885 when she was 30 years old. It concerned a heroine who was sent via “Physical Electricity” to visit other planets. Subsequent novels also dealt with mystical and spiritual experiences, but many deplored mankind’s weaknesses (absinthe addiction in Wormwood) or celebrated womankind’s strengths, although she was an ambivalent feminist (against the vote but for independence). She was prescient about atomic power, germ warfare, sex education in schools, and historic preservation. Settled in Stratford-on-Avon with her lifelong friend Bertha van der Vyver, she antagonized the town fathers with her fight to preserve Shakespeare-era cottages and continued to scuffle with them through WWI. Corelli died in 1924, but her books had a brief New Age revival in the 1960s. The author has struggled to piece together fragmented historical material, for which Victorian scholars will be grateful. (12 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-7509-1570-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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