A sumptuous literary biography.
Revealing portrait of the noted—and notorious—writer, viewed through the prism of the books that educated, inspired and comforted him.
From birth, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was awash in words. His Anglo-Irish parents recounted aloud local tales, classic literature and their own work (Sir William was a pioneering folklorist, Lady Wilde “a famous poetess”), fostering both an early aptitude and undying love for language, writing and books. Wilde thrilled at collecting and devouring a variety of volumes; each added to his prodigious intellect as well as to a store of ideas that contributed to many a lush oration. His years at Oxford were marked by extravagant academic accomplishments, particularly in the classics he had loved since childhood, and by symposiums hosted with Socratic gusto in his school quarters. As an adult of growing notoriety, Wilde found sustenance, inspiration and solace in his prized library; he regarded the carefully collected books as both “a record of his life and as an emblem of his personality.” Wilde scholar Wright (editor: Oscar Wilde’s Table Talk, 2001), who spent 20 years reading this library, allows his own prose to convey his subject’s literary duality—excess and allusion. “Hubris had provoked the wrath of the Gods, and Doom entered the stage with running feet,” he writes of the guilty verdict in the infamous Queensbury trial, referring to the Greek tragedies that provided so much joy to Wilde the reader but also inescapably pervaded his life. In general, the author suggests, Wilde enjoyed “the pleasant confusion of life and art”—until his prison sentence forced him to become an actual tragic hero. At the start of his incarceration, all of his belongings, including his entire library, were sold at public auction to settle his debts. An “inconsolable” Wilde suffered the losses behind bars; he would never fully recover. The author accents this remarkable account with pages of Wilde’s reading lists, reproductions of annotated books and an index of referenced authors.
A sumptuous literary biography.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8993-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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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