A praiseworthy if perfunctory biography of Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the “first woman in the world” to receive a university doctorate. Elena Cornaro was not only beautiful, brilliant, and of good family, but chaste, compassionate, generous and so dedicated to her Roman Catholic religious beliefs that she wore a monk’s habit under her elaborate silk gowns. Born in 1646, by the time she was 11 years old, she had learned Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish, and was studying art, music, philosophy, and history. She went on to become proficient in four more languages as well as mathematics, astronomy, and physics. She had also taken vows of chastity that put her in conflict with her father, who wanted her to make an advantageous marriage. They compromised: she would remain a virgin, but give up her dream of entering a convent. He continued to support her studies and frequently showed off her erudition at parties and gatherings of distinguished scholars. Elena’s academic reputation grew until she was recommended as a candidate for a degree at the University of Padua, passing her final exam when she was 30 years old. However, she had punished her health with “extreme penance,” wearing hair shirts and starving herself (a condition called “holy anorexia”), and died at 38. After many funeral honors, she was buried in a chapel in Padua, now called the Cornaro Chapel. In the US, she is venerated by a stained glass window at Vassar College. Unfortunately, very few of Elena’s own writings survived, so freelance writer and editor Guernsey tries to give dimension to Elena’s life by describing her extended family, the tutors and notables who influenced her, as well as depicting life in Venice in the late 17th century. Limited introduction to a woman who is a heroine of Vassar graduates and other women scholars. (55 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 1-883551-44-7
Page Count: 276
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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