A delightful opportunity to get in touch with your inner loser. (16-page b&w photo insert)
Debut author Collins dissects the fickle fortunes of fame with 13 vignettes of men and women who dared to dream but failed to achieve.
What happens to the schemers and the dreamers whose plans lose their moorings in reality, whose theories do not quite jibe with actuality? Collins introduces us to a medley of such unfortunate souls, including the eponymous John Banvard. This true visionary created “moving panoramas,” an artistic innovation in which he claimed to scroll three miles of canvas before his audience’s unbelieving eyes; the resulting hullabaloo made him the star of the 19th-century art world until he was upstaged by master huckster P.T. Barnum. Now fallen into outright obscurity, Banvard serves as Collins’s leading exemplar of fame gone wrong, of early successes dashed by unlucky combinations of bad timing, bad luck, and bad judgment. The reader also meets such obscure figures as playwright and Shakespearean plagiarist William Henry Ireland, John Cleves Symmes (who attempted to prove that the earth is hollow and inhabited on the inside), Professor Rene Blondlot (discoverer of the non-existent N-rays—similar to X-rays but, well, nonexistent), Ephraim Bull (who lost out to Thomas Welch in the race to cash in on Concord grapes), and A.J. Pleaston (who recommended growing plants and healing humans with the salubrious effects of blue light). These unfortunates, as well as the others Collins has dug up from obscurity, made noble attempts to change the world for the better and failed miserably. One might quibble with some of Collins’s selections for inclusion (some of the failures are not nearly as spectacular as the others), but the joy of the lot lies in contemplating the whims of fortune and the foolhardiness of humanity, while delighting in Collins’s crisp prose and engaging storytelling.
A delightful opportunity to get in touch with your inner loser. (16-page b&w photo insert)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26886-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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