A deeply sympathetic dual biography.
The intellectual and emotional bond between two major 19th-century writers is revealed in their own words.
When they first met in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was the acclaimed author of Nature, his first essay collection, and had launched his career as a public lecturer; Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), just graduated from Harvard and living in Concord, Massachusetts, soon was pulled into Emerson’s orbit. The two men took long walks together, and Thoreau often was found at Emerson’s dinner table. The connection between them was noticeable: Friends commented on Thoreau’s “unconscious imitation” of the cadences of Emerson’s speech. “Mr. Emerson does talk like my Henry,” Thoreau’s mother remarked. For the next 25 years, they enjoyed a rare, fertile friendship. “Their influence was, from the very beginning, mutual,” writes Cramer (editor: Essays by Henry D. Thoreau: A Fully Annotated Edition, 2013, etc.). Editor of many works by Emerson and Thoreau and curator of collections at the Walden Woods Project’s Thoreau Institute, Cramer brings both authority and sensitivity to his biographical overview and to a judicious selection of excerpts from the men’s prolific writings. Emerson thought Thoreau “uncommon in mind and character”; Thoreau’s praise of Emerson was effusive: “More of the divine realized in him than in any,” he wrote in his journal in 1846. Both men prized friendship as a meeting of minds and as emotional sustenance. “Friendship,” Emerson wrote, “should be a great promise, a perennial springtime.” From Thoreau, he received a gift: “in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief, my own ethics.” Despite shared admiration, their friendship was not without tensions. Thoreau often was unsatisfied, “discouraged so far as my relation to him is concerned.” At times, he felt unrecognized and disappointed. “Talked, or tried to talk, with Emerson,” he complained in 1853. Emerson found Thoreau lacking drive—“instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party”—and often reticent, even cold. Thoreau, he remarked, after the younger man died, “was with difficulty sweet.”
A deeply sympathetic dual biography.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-131-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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