Sprawling over the boundary between biography and fiction, a tale of the passionate adventures of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson (18411918). There was little in Fanny Stevenson's Indiana farm background that would predict her courageous flight from Victorian convention, unless it was her father's Universalist religion or his determination to teach his daughters to be independent-minded. After following her first husband to the mining districts of Nevada and then to San Francisco, she left him to study painting in France, where she met Robert Louis Stevenson. Ever determined to be in the forefront of artistic trends, Fanny returned to California and settled in Monterey, where Stevenson joined her. She divorced her unfaithful, alcoholic husband in the teeth of opposition from even her most liberal relatives and married Stevenson. They then set out on their well-documented wanderings in the south of France, New York, Hawaii, and the South Seas. Lapierre (daughter of Dominique Lapierre) focuses almost entirely on Fanny and her family, rescuing her from the condescension and even hatred of Robert Louis Stevenson's friends, admirers, and biographers. But is this rightly called a biography? In a preliminary ``warning to the reader,'' Lapierre asserts that the facts conveyed here are strictly true, but concedes that she has often taken the best parts of several letters and reconstructed a better one for her biography. Furthermore, she frequently composes hypothetical conversations in order to make a good story or to illustrate the states of mind of Fanny and those around her. Yet Lapierre reassures the reader, not only with recurrent warnings in the text about gaps in her knowledge, but with intelligent commentary and attention to telling detail. Having energetically retraced Fanny Stevenson's steps, she uses her own knowledge of Nevada, Panama, and Samoa to give the reader a sense of immediacy and place. Published in a smooth and unobtrusive translation from the French, this book is difficult to put down.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0127-7
Page Count: 520
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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