Sometimes excessive in her praise of Lowell, the author nonetheless has crafted an enduring and often lovely monument to his...
A stunning biography of a young man from one of American’s most celebrated families who quickly rose to the rank of colonel in the Union cavalry and died, at age 29, from wounds suffered in a charge at Cedar Creek.
At the funeral of Charles Russell Lowell (1835–64), nephew of poet James Russell Lowell, were some of the greatest names in American letters: Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes (the cast of The Dante Club!). Hawthorne would have been there, too, had he not died himself a few months earlier. Bundy has examined an abundance of evidence in her reconstruction of the life of this most remarkable fellow—family letters and diaries, published histories of the Civil War (and of its individual encounters), biographies of key figures in the story. She begins with Lowell’s death, then retreats to examine his ancestry (on numerous branches of the family tree, a copy of which would have been helpful), and then relates the short, mostly happy life of her principal. Lowell did well in school (winning top honors at both Boston Latin and Harvard) but then, like many other young men, spun his wheels before finding traction in his military career. Before the Civil War, he worked for a merchant, tried the iron business, got involved in a grain deal. Then, in the mid-1850s, he showed signs of tuberculosis. Fortunately, however, the disease went into partial remission, enabling him to live a very active life—including a lengthy tour of the Continent (he visited Italian museums with Hawthorne) and a successful stint in the railroad business in Iowa. Once the Civil War began, Lowell and many of his Harvard coevals enlisted to fight (most would be wounded or killed), and he discovered his talents for leadership. His cavalry unit chased the notorious Mosby, won some impressive encounters, earned the respect of the military brass. When Lowell died, Custer wept.
Sometimes excessive in her praise of Lowell, the author nonetheless has crafted an enduring and often lovely monument to his memory. (80 b&w illustrations; 1 map, not seen)Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-12077-3
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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