Literary travel meets history, laced with cartloads of trivia and endless good humor. Somewhere Tom Paine, scourge of kings...
The embodiment of revolution comes in for an appropriately anarchic—and wild, and thoroughly enjoyable—appreciation.
Fans of Mornington Crescent, a game of “complete and utter nonsense” that is more familiar to Brits than Americans, will be quite at home with blogger/editor/journalist/McSweeney’s regular Collins’s elegantly written but highly centrifugal treatment of what happened to Thomas Paine’s remains. “Any rube visiting Britain” is free to ask the rules of Mornington Crescent, observes Collins, but he is sure to be “methodically flummoxed with absurdly fake histories of the game and utter evasion as to its actual workings.” So it is with this masterpiece of misdirection, which opens at a gay bar in Manhattan on the site of which Paine died. A few beers later, Collins is chasing across the water, where William Cobbett, antinomian author of countless libertarian pamphlets, had spirited Paine’s bones. His skull a Yorick-like talisman for London radicals, Paine did yeoman service in the afterlife, but eventually, bits and pieces of his body went wandering off into the collections of vicars and natural philosophers—and as to just where, well, Collins asks and is flummoxed, and not just because all the high street house numbers have been changed since Georgian days. Confronted with failure, Collins takes delightful detours into the odd lives of the Victorian vegetarians and phrenologists and freethinkers who kept the Paine cult going as Paine himself was steadily forgotten in their day, a sad fate for an author whose Common Sense once sold second only to the Bible. The search takes Collins through dusty warrens and back alleys and rainy roads, all full of the promise of adventure; even a London bench “missing every single one of its slats” has a role in the great game that’s afoot.
Literary travel meets history, laced with cartloads of trivia and endless good humor. Somewhere Tom Paine, scourge of kings and conventions, is smiling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-502-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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