Readers who grew up on Lindgren’s stories will find this excellent book irresistible—and often surprising.
Insightful, elegantly written biography of the beloved author of the Pippi Longstocking tales, a complex woman of parts.
“Life is not as rotten as it seems.” It’s not much of an affirmation, but, Danish biographer and literary critic Andersen (Hans Christian Andersen, 2005) suggests, it was about the best that Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002) could do. Born into a family of farmers who instilled in her the virtues of hard work and a certain Nordic stoicism, Lindgren started off as a teenager fresh out of school working as a journalist—and quickly became pregnant by the mercurial editor, who, though “neither a journalist nor an author…could hear the difference between good and bad storytelling.” One wishes for Lindgren’s sake that he had been a better man, but the editor clearly knew that Lindgren had a gift. It was, Andersen writes, a gift laden with psychological insecurities. Without being too obvious about it, many of Lindgren’s stories were about loneliness, isolation, and depression, and while she reckoned, following a researcher’s findings, that Hans Christian Andersen wrote about death in “five-sixths” of his stories, she kept pace: “the same goes for my fairy-tales,” she said, “more or less.” Lindgren wrote in a range of genres, including books for grown-ups that included crime stories, comedies, and fables as well as her famed writings for young readers; many, as Andersen recounts, had a political edge as well as a psychological dimension, some specifically anti-Nazi. A fascinating aspect of the book is Andersen’s theory of the origins of the Pippi Longstocking stories in debates about childhood education, for while Lindgren wrote about the effects of loneliness on children, she also posited a world in which children could play freely, of a kind with and drawing on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, and, unexpectedly, the Superman comic book franchise.
Readers who grew up on Lindgren’s stories will find this excellent book irresistible—and often surprising.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-22610-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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