For die-hard Byron fans only.
A disappointing biography of the two most significant women in Byron’s life: wife Annabella and half-sister Augusta, who was also his lover.
Crane (Lord Byron’s Jackal, 1999) argues that Lady Byron and Augusta Leigh were bitter enemies because each made the mistake of loving the poster child for English Romanticism’s destructive tendencies. Byron seduced them both, then left both high and dry. In a sense, he married Annabella in 1815 to escape his incestuous passion for Augusta, but in fact he was happier flouting convention than living the married life, especially when that life involved responsibility for children and the mountain of debt he’d accumulated as a bachelor. Annabella realized early in their marriage that she was doomed to unhappiness, while Augusta distanced herself from the love of her life. Rumors of Byron’s affair with Augusta circulated at around the same time he left England for the continent, ruining both their reputations. Crane’s account of all this is competent enough until the narrative comes to a screeching and improbable halt smack in the middle with a fictional account of a meeting between the two women more than 25 years after Byron’s death. Although it serves the author’s purpose of clearly presenting Annabella and Augusta’s relationship of mingled animosity, love, and respect, this character development comes too late and offers too little. Written in an irritating script format composed only of dialogue and notes approximating stage directions, the interlude is stylistically intrusive and psychologically incredible. The restrained emotion and deep insights Crane attributes to both women are more annoying than persuasive, their dialogue is absurd: “You knew that, knew that even if he could escape your malice . . . then you could enjoy all the satisfaction of virtuous revenge,” intones Augusta. It’s hard to believe anyone ever talked in such a manner, even in the mid-19th century.
For die-hard Byron fans only.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40648-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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