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MARMEE & LOUISA

THE UNTOLD STORY OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT AND HER MOTHER

Thoroughly researched and moving—will appeal particularly to 19th-century women’s history buffs, Alcott fans and Little...

Revisionist dual biography shows just how much iconic children’s author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) “was her mother’s daughter.”

LaPlante (Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall, 2007, etc.), a descendant of Abigail May Alcott’s brother, relies on previously undiscovered family papers and untapped pages from Abigail’s dairies to provide new evidence exposing her undeniable influence on her daughter. Born to a prestigious Boston family, intellectually ambitious Abigail sought independence and dreamed of “teaching school and learning more about the world,” until she found her “ideal friend” in self-made, self-styled reformer Bronson Alcott. LaPlante ably demonstrates that Abigail was a “vibrant writer, brilliant teacher and passionate reformer;” she fought to eradicate slavery and promote women’s equality. When Bronson proved incapable of supporting his wife and children, Abigail, like many 19th-century women, sacrificed her ambitions to maintain the family. In contrast to earlier Alcott biographies that credit Bronson for guiding their daughter’s education and ideas, LaPlante suggests it was Abigail who nurtured Louisa’s feminist ideals and encouraged her to write and keep a diary. The author also hints that Abigail’s unsatisfactory marriage and disappointment contributed to Louisa’s determination to remain a spinster and earn enough money writing stories to care for her beloved Marmee. Fresh material gives flesh to the formerly invisible Abigail, revealing how she and her famous daughter mirrored one another in temperament and depended on one another emotionally. Both longed for freedom; neither achieved it. LaPlante emphasizes Abigail’s family, especially her brother, abolitionist Samuel Joseph May, as well as Abigail's and Louisa’s involvement in the women’s rights movement.

Thoroughly researched and moving—will appeal particularly to 19th-century women’s history buffs, Alcott fans and Little Women aficionados.

Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4516-2066-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012

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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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