A successful attempt to deepen the way we read Dickens, with clues to finding him in his own characters and words.
Pulitzer-winning novelist Smiley (Horse Heaven, 2000, etc.) brings her fluid prose to a fresh and insightful look, through a psychological lens, at the life of Dickens.
True to the always-interesting Penguin Lives form, Smiley takes a leap over the usual approach to biography. Assuming her readers know that Dickens’s family was sent to debtors’ prison when he was a child and that he was humiliated about working in a blacking factory, the author makes her task revealing the man through his writing. She shows us Dickens the “self-made phenomenon”; a truly modern man, a public figure, an actor, and a manipulator. He’s 21 at the outset of this study, sitting in Westminster Abbey on the moment of his first published character sketch, revelling in a quiet, swelling pride. From here, she presents the man as he would have appeared to his contemporaries, weaving together the public presentation of Dickens via his journalism, novels, and letters, stitching up the occasional gap with reference to the more detailed biographies already published. She occasionally credits her reader with too much prior knowledge of the subject’s novels, but in general, she’s a generous guide. Smiley is a writer who knows and loves her craft; her exploration of Dickens’s writing process is clearly aimed at the lay reader and novel-writer alike. Along the way, she reveals his vast energy, his deep social conscience, his prefiguring of Freud, his strong business sense, and his failure to find true companionship. The account is a fast read, glazed with humor even at its most poignant.
A successful attempt to deepen the way we read Dickens, with clues to finding him in his own characters and words.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03077-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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