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SALVATION

SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF ST. FRANCIS

Martin observes that she is not a Catholic or particularly religious, not a scholar of medieval Italy, “not even a man.”...

Literate, sympathetic vignettes from the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

Novelist Martin (Italian Fever, 1999, etc.) puts her storytelling skills to good use in this impressionistic, respectful appreciation of St. Francis’s life. Many of the scenes are so well realized that they resemble tableaux vivantes: Francesco di Pietro Bernardone’s repudiation of his family wealth for a life of poverty, his mysterious acquisition of stigmata after weathering a mountaintop storm, his conversations with crusading knights and dangerous beasts, his painful death—all these spring to life from the page. Drawing on a wealth of documentary evidence, but cheerfully inventing dialogue, the author takes pains to emphasize that “though San Francesco was a great mystic, he was also entirely of this world,” with all the attendant urges and frailties. For all that, Martin does a fine job of depicting Francis’s otherworldly qualities—as when, in one memorable episode, an errant spark sets his robe on fire and Francis refused to allow his fellow monks to put it out, murmuring, “Oh, do not harm Brother Fire.” (Later he goes naked, explaining that he feels shame for denying Brother Fire a meal.) Though not overly concerned with historical setting, Martin offers useful asides on Francis’s era, noting, for instance, that his radical renunciation of money came in a period when currency was an increasingly important instrument, and when guarding it grew into an obsession among Italy’s well-to-do.

Martin observes that she is not a Catholic or particularly religious, not a scholar of medieval Italy, “not even a man.” Nevertheless, her nuanced, thoughtful portrait of the medieval Italian reformer, so torn between manhood and sainthood, will be of great appeal to many.

Pub Date: March 13, 2001

ISBN: 0-375-40983-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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