A solid grounding to the saint’s life that provides the footing necessary to explore more speculative works like, for...
Freeman (Classics/Washington Univ.) sticks close to authenticated sources in this quick and rangy popular biography, which serves up a taste of life and times in Ireland and late-Roman Britain during the fifth century.
Since the author prefers to expostulate on the facts as they are known and to set one piece aside another without forcing the fit, there is little narrative drive to his life of Ireland’s patron saint—but then, Patrick wasn’t given to high drama. Freeman’s strength lies in his ability to bring a place to life in the mind’s eye. Britain in the weak final years of Roman rule, before the medieval Anglo-Saxon community took hold, was an unstable terrain subject to raids by the Picts, Saxon, and Irish. A group of the latter spirited Patrick away from his family and into slavery on (most likely) the west coast of Ireland. The author is patient with the material; when he notes that Patrick’s family were nobles and farmers, he discusses the nature of Roman governance and the look and feel of a typical British villa/farmstead, all of which adds terrific color to the story. Infectiously smitten with the age, if perhaps less so with the saint, Freeman delights with overviews of the political and social landscape Patrick entered upon his return to Ireland, as well as the spiritual environment that was already in place. He delivers a sharp, elementary course in traditional local religions, including Druidism, and the role of celibate women in the early Christian church. He describes Patrick’s Confessions, actually one of only two extant letters from the saint, as a “window into the soul of a person,” far more intimate than Cicero’s letters or Augustine’s Confessions and, as such, “like no other document from ancient times.”
A solid grounding to the saint’s life that provides the footing necessary to explore more speculative works like, for example, E.A. Thompson’s Who Was Saint Patrick? (1986).Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5632-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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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