Thickly footnoted and thoughtful, this 200th birthday tribute to the great writer makes for rewarding if sometimes arduous...
Like a character in one of his own fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen almost magically transformed himself from penniless street urchin to one of Europe's most celebrated authors. Here, a scholarly, penetrating biography proves that Andersen’s life also had much of the Dickens novel in it.
“What a mystery I am to myself!” Andersen once wrote. That mystery was in part self-created. The author spent a lifetime running from a childhood of squalor and hardship. (In his own autobiographies, he suppressed the fact that his aunt and grandmother were prostitutes and that his alcoholic mother died in a poorhouse hospital just a few miles from where the 28-year-old author was then living comfortably.) Best remembered for children’s tales like “Thumbelina,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling,” the prolific writer composed more than 30 volumes of literary works, including novels, plays and poetry. Now, a biographer intelligently examines these, along with Andersen’s voluminous correspondence, to create a compelling portrait of both the author and of the world he traveled in. Andersen is revealed as a man who was self-centered, vain and emotionally needy, yet possessed of a childlike wonder and innocence. Tall, awkward and generally unattractive physically (“The Ugly Duckling,” like much of his writing, was clearly autobiographical), Andersen was a confirmed bachelor who doggedly remained a virgin his entire life. That’s not to say he didn’t fall in love. He pursued many platonic affairs, more often with men than women. And his critics, including the Danish Soren Kierkegaard, were not above attacking Andersen for his “effeminate, unmanly” ways and for writings that often centered on platonic romance between men. Nevertheless, Andersen was an unstoppable force, both as author and celebrity. His wanderlust took him on 30 extended tours of Europe during his 70 years, and he was toasted everywhere.
Thickly footnoted and thoughtful, this 200th birthday tribute to the great writer makes for rewarding if sometimes arduous reading.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-642-X
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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