Hallucinatory and quite mad (Shelley would approve): helpful in deciphering his work but hardly his life.
From Economist editor and biographer Wroe (The Perfect Prince, 2003, etc.), a dreamy, decidedly unorthodox biography of the Romantic poet.
Wroe hastily dispatches the biographical facts, then subsequently jumps around, dropping names and dates she assumes the reader is familiar with. Born in Sussex in 1792 to a landowner and MP against whom he violently rebelled, Shelley attended Eton and Oxford, from which he was expelled in 1811 for an incendiary pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism. He capped off an epistolary romance by eloping with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, whom he abandoned within two years. In 1814, he ran off with Mary Godwin, the daughter of philosopher William Godwin (who had been Shelley’s mentor) and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In Pisa and Florence, Mary and Percy wrote, lived beyond their means, maintained friendships with Byron and others, then grew estranged as Shelley flirted with their neighbor, Jane Williams. He drowned while sailing with her husband in 1822. For Wroe, these facts are far less important than Shelley’s intense devotion to beauty and to the poet’s role as seer. He dedicated his life to those ideals, probably under a heavy addiction to laudanum. Essential here are the author’s profound readings of and sympathy for Shelley’s poetry, from Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound to A Defence of Poetry. She also nicely documents Shelley’s sense of social justice on the one hand, his flagrant egoism on the other.
Hallucinatory and quite mad (Shelley would approve): helpful in deciphering his work but hardly his life.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42493-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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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