Parini, a poet (House of Days, 1998), biographer (John Steinbeck, 1995), and novelist (Benjamin’s Crossing, 1998), delivers a sensitive life of Frost that highlights the poet’s struggle to find light and stability in an existence filled with darkness and chaos. In old age, Frost was as full of honors as of years, a literary lion who received four Pulitzers and innumerable honorary degrees and recited his poetry at John Kennedy’s inauguration. The triumph was all the more striking in that Frost had battled against modernist tendencies in poetry, collectivist tendencies in politics, and his own fears of madness. Parini does not depart radically from the contours of Frost’s life outlined in Laurence Thompson’s groundbreaking, Pulitzer Prize—winning work, including discussions of his alcoholic father, years of uncertainty as a farmer, the poetic breakthrough he achieved in his two years in England, and his sorrow and self-reproach over the death of his wife. But he offers a corrective to Thompson’s underlying animus toward his subject (a dislike probably exacerbated by the competition of Frost and Thompson for the poet’s secretary, Kay Morrison). He shows that Frost was frequently afflicted by depression (as were his father, sister, and two children who committed suicide), but that he remained a caring if difficult husband and father, a charming if cantankerous friend, and a lively if unconventional teacher. Parini sees each poem as a victory over depression, anxiety, fear, and sloth. He is particularly good at tracing how Frost was influenced by Emerson, William James, Swedenborg, and Yeats; in demonstrating Frost’s achievement in writing poetry that would adhere to the bones of human speech; and in arguing that his seemingly simple verse masked a classical education that rivaled that of Eliot and Pound. For the 125th anniversary of the poet’s birth, here is neither hagiography nor pathography. Parini’s life magnificently details how Frost, through fortitude and lifelong dedication to craft, sought to heed his own advice to be whole again beyond confusion. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-3181-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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 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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