A wild, occasionally messy, ultimately enthralling work of biography.
An exhaustive portrait of the author of Dracula and his suppressed emotional life.
Skal (Halloween: The History of America’s Darkest Holiday, 2016, etc.), a cultural historian and horror film and literature critic, delves into Bram Stoker’s life (1847-1912) deeper than others before him—and there have been countless critical considerations of Dracula’s provenance since its appearance in 1897, many of which the author shares here. An exemplary gentleman of a certain class, Dublin-born Stoker embodied the anxieties of the highly charged Victorian era, especially fears about the (sexual) body, disease, miasmal vapors, and blood-borne “contagion” and “degeneration.” Indeed, Stoker gleaned early on as a bedridden child (born at the height of the Irish famine, no less) the ghastly tales his mother told about the cholera epidemic of her youth. Skal underscores how strikingly similar Stoker’s life was to that of Oscar Wilde. They both attended Trinity College, where they absorbed “pseudoscientific theories of mind, body, and eros,” were fascinated by the theater and fairy tales (terrifying theatrical pantomimes, in Stoker’s case), were drawn to the homoerotic work of Walt Whitman (Stoker wrote him bashful fan letters), and were romantically connected to the same woman, Florence Balcombe, who rejected Wilde and married Stoker. Skal uses Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray as a kind of touchstone against which to explore themes of male attraction and “the leprosies of sin,” foretelling Wilde’s public downfall and the “submerged self” that Stoker injected into his character Count Dracula. Mostly, however, Stoker was a man of the theater, the acting manager for the famous actor Henry Irving at London’s Lyceum Theatre for over 25 years, and such a workaholic that Skal wonders how he could have found time to write (stories, criticism, novels) so prolifically. The author also assiduously sifts through Dracula productions from then until today.
A wild, occasionally messy, ultimately enthralling work of biography.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-010-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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