A troubling, important assessment of Yeats’s life and work.
A cogent—and densely scholarly—political study by Dublin historian and librarian Mc Cormack that delves uneasily into Yeats’s flirtation with fascism and eugenics.
By the end of Yeats’s life, in early 1939, the great Irish poet and Nobel laureate was deeply disillusioned by the course of Irish politics, in which he had been active for decades. His group of friends, such as Maude Gonne and her pro-Nazi son-in-law Francis Stuart, were anti-Semites, and his own After Strange Gods (1934) is explicit in its hostility toward Jews, while the posthumously published On the Boiler (1939) is a methodical treatment of the politics of hatred. The first major poke at Yeats’s Brahmin status among intellectuals came about with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s 1965 essay “Passion and Cunning,” which exploded the poet’s fascist leanings and knocked him from the pedestal established in earlier biographies by Joseph Hone, Richard Ellmann and A.N. Jeffares. Mc Cormack works backward here, from the pall surrounding the poet’s death to the announcement of Yeats as co-winner of the Frankfurt Plakette award in honor of Goethe’s centenary in 1932, sanctioned by the new Nazi regime, and the German production of his play The Countess Cathleen in 1934, produced by SS commander Friedrich Bethge. The author even explores Yeats’s confusion over sexuality and politics after his vasectomy in 1935, when he was 70, a procedure that seemed to have restored his manly vigor. Moreover, Yeats was actively wooed by the Nazis, as the author notes: “His ‘mystical’ and folklore interests were manifestly compatible with their ideology.” Mc Cormack moves backward still into the “intrusive ghosts” of Augustan poets like Swift, who haunted the poet’s work and mindset, as well as the Victorian roots in engendering the twin motivating forces of the early-20th century—militarism and anti-Semitism. Mc Cormack has previously written on the Anglo-Irish literary tradition, and his writing is erudite and well-informed, though often murky to navigate. However, this is a significant study, cold-eyed and solidly researched.
A troubling, important assessment of Yeats’s life and work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7126-6514-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pimlico/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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