A thorough, engaging, and even loving restoration of a woman writer whose story needed to be told and whose works required...
A scholarly, riveting life of an English poet and novelist whose precocious career ended in sexual scandal and controversy about her sudden death.
Literary critic Miller (The Brontë Myth, 2004), the founding editorial director of independent British publisher Notting Hill Editions, successfully returns to public awareness the astonishing (and brief) career and achievements of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), who, for a time, seemed to create poems as easily as she breathed. However, her personal life—scandalous to the emerging Victorians—sent her stock plummeting, and she died in West Africa of causes whose mysteries Miller does much to dispel. The author begins with Landon’s death, provides a quick sketch of her initial popularity, and then returns to a fairly strict chronology. Miller describes her subject’s background and her long association and sexual relationship with her married mentor, William Jerdan, editor at the time of the Literary Gazette. Jerdan promoted her career—and sired her three children, none of whom remained in her care, or his. For a while, L.E.L., as she signed her pieces, was a literary sensation, and Miller places her as sort of a transitional figure between the Romantics (Shelley, Byron et al.) and the Victorians. The text, in fact, is populated heavily with literary heavyweights, including Dickens, the Brontës, Poe, Woolf, and numerous others. The extent of Miller’s research is impressive and includes her visit to the scene of Landon’s death. The author seems to have read everything even marginally relevant, and she maintains a strong auctorial presence, noting—bluntly and accurately—the era’s male literary dominance and the grotesque double standard of private behavior. Libidinous men suffered few consequences: Jerdan himself moved on to another teenager after he tired of Landon.
A thorough, engaging, and even loving restoration of a woman writer whose story needed to be told and whose works required fresh, attentive eyes.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-375-41278-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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 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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