Powerful and evocative.
Poet and biographer Epstein (What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, 2001, etc.) brings insight from both his specialties to bear on two defining figures of the Civil War era.
Whitman and Lincoln never met, although the two were evidently in the same room on several occasions as the president greeted visitors to the White House while Whitman watched from an unobtrusive distance. Yet Epstein argues that the two exerted a powerful influence on one another. Lincoln reportedly read Leaves of Grass before he began his political career, and the author finds traces of Whitman’s rhetoric in Lincoln’s speeches. In Whitman’s case, the influence has long been recognized. Several poems pay tribute to the fallen leader, and in his latter years Whitman lectured on his memories of Lincoln and on the president’s place in the nation’s history. In this dual biography, Epstein undertakes to suggest a closer connection. He does so largely by connecting the two men’s lives in Washington during the war years, when Whitman served as a volunteer nurse to wounded Union and Confederate soldiers, supporting himself with clerical jobs for various governmental agencies. The heart of the book concerns Whitman’s nursing of the wounded soldiers, for whom he felt a strong empathy. (One of them became, for a time, his lover.) His volume of war poetry, Drum Taps, grew out of his direct experience of the conflict’s human cost. Whitman frequently observed Lincoln traveling around the district and was part of the crowd for several official appearances, including the Second Inaugural Address. Whether the shaggy bohemian poet made any impression on the busy president is anyone’s guess; Epstein understandably speculates, but generally manages not to overstate his case. He is at his best in his sensitive readings of Whitman’s poems about Lincoln, especially the elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
Powerful and evocative.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-45799-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
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