As solid as its subject’s surviving buildings, and a useful addition to Restoration studies. (16-page color insert, b&w...
A lucid portrait, abrim with encyclopedic detail, of the English architect, scientist, and inventor.
Biographers, it is true, have long overlooked Wren (1632–1723), but British historian Jardine (Ingenious Pursuits, 1999, etc.) incorrectly claims that hers is “the first integrated modern account of his career.” Not so: Adrian Tinniswood’s His Invention So Fertile (2002) was both integrated and modern, if a little on the slow side. Without supplanting Tinniswood’s biography, which is more scientifically fluent, Jardine’s is more pleasurable to read as it covers much of the same ground. The author marvels, and appropriately so, at Wren’s scholarly attainments, extraordinary even in an age when such brilliant, multitalented individuals as John Locke, Samuel Pepys, and William Harvey were working their wonders. Jardine does not shy away from the gruesome subjects of Wren’s early scientific experiments; he once claimed that he could “easily contrive to convey any liquid Poison into the Mass of Blood” and set about doing so by slicing open an unfortunate dog and introducing into it “2 ounces of Infusion of Crocus Metall: thus injected, the Dog immediately fell a Vomitting, & so vomited till he died.” Fortunately for the dogs of London (and squeamish readers), Wren turned to architecture, designing St. Paul’s Cathedral and other grand structures in the aftermath of the great London fire of 1666. Caught up in the complex, antimonarchical political struggles sweeping England, he had a way of picking the losing side, which diminished his reputation within his lifetime. Jardine remarks sympathetically that “the failure of each of his royal patrons in turn . . . to see through to completion the great buildings Wren designed for them as their ‘great Monuments’ was symptomatic of their failure to give moral leadership,” and symptomatic of the difficulties he faced as an artist dependent on a fickle, endangered audience.
As solid as its subject’s surviving buildings, and a useful addition to Restoration studies. (16-page color insert, b&w illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019974-1
Page Count: 624
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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