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 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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