This, the life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), is Graham Greene's only biographical venture. Written in the early 1930's, it was not published at the time: Rochester's scandalous reputation as the Restoration's most debauched rake-hell, atheist and pornographer made publishers wary, and delayed for many years a due recognition of his very considerable poetic talents. "He might have been another Donne" had not the infamy of his life overshadowed his art. As it was, Rochester shone brightly for a few years at the head of the "merry gang" of sensualists that flocked about Charles Il in the early days of the Restoration when London cast off Puritanism and all flung themselves into a reckless orgy of merriment. A burnt-out case at 33, Rochester is a perfect subject for Greene who sees him as a "spoiled Puritan" using his wit to wreak vengeance on a corrupt and cynical society, not excluding the King and his many mistresses whom Rochester lampooned mercilessly. It was, as Greene points out, an age when Hobbes set the moral tone; the glitter and repartee at Court masked the most vicious and depraved practices. When banished from royal favor as he frequently was, Rochester continued his madcap adventures by setting himself up as an astrologer or an innkeeper, making love as a porter and traveling the roads as a beggar. Whores and lordly ruffians were his constant companions and when, on his deathbed, he became a penitent and embraced Christianity, friends and enemies scorned the conversion as madness. In the words of a contemporary, Rochester lived "as a torch to light himself to Hell thereby" and Greene charts his passage to that fiery place with the taut, restrained compassion which he always extends to fallen idols and angels.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1974
ISBN: 0140101543
Page Count: 197
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1974
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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