A brisk, entertaining, and richly detailed portrait of a unique woman and her era.
The life of a prodigious playwright is set in the context of roiling political dramas.
In 1670, with the London opening of her play The Forc’d Marriage, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) launched a career as one of the most prolific dramatists of Restoration England. In a revision of her biography of Behn published in 1996, Todd (A Man of Genius, 2016, etc.), editor of the seven-volume Complete Works of Aphra Behn, The Poetry of Aphra Behn, and the journal Aphra Behn Studies, offers an authoritative portrait of a defiant, wily, and enterprising woman. Todd acknowledges that much scholarship has been undertaken in the 20 years since her original biography, and she cites about two dozen of these studies in her bibliography; however, they seem to have affirmed, rather than altered, her shrewd, sweeping view of 17th-century England and the admiring portrait she ably fashioned in her earlier book. Tall, attractive, and witty, Behn was “gregarious, enjoying an evening of sociability,” and fond of drink. She was “sensual as much as sexual, interested in both men and women,” and likely preferred “flirtation and repartee” as a way of avoiding venereal disease and pregnancy. She was adventuresome as well, traveling to the British colony of Surinam, probably as a spy, in the early 1660s, returning as Mrs. Behn; scholars have been unable to identify the mysterious Mr. Behn. A comely widow, she was courted by the “moody and self-centered” Jack Hoyle, with whom she fell in love. “Behn would desire other men sexually,” Todd asserts, “but no one rivalled Jack Hoyle in her imaginative and emotional life.” Steeped as she is in Behn’s work, Todd gives close, perceptive readings of her oeuvre, including her abundant output of poetry; where relevant, she connects these works to the politics of the time: the clash of Catholicism and Protestantism, the rise of Tories and Whigs, and the fraught royal succession. Her “political principles were those of a ‘pseudo-aristocrat’ ” who “internalized” upper-class views and pretensions.
A brisk, entertaining, and richly detailed portrait of a unique woman and her era.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-909572-06-5
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Fentum Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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