Dr. Johnson was engaged, according to Dr. Fussell's entertaining monograph, in savagely honest exercises in this world's significations and the obligations attendant on the next. Pragmatic, empirical, regarding literature as a "quasi-legal argument" involving the absolute mastery of techniques, Johnson was wholly of his age, but contributed less of a lordly overview than an aggressive, corrosive determination to "locate reality." Fussell explores the major works — the Rambler selections, Rasselas, the Dictionary, Lives of the English Poets — and there are gallivanting analyses of such bizarre items as letters on behalf of a condemned man, prayers, and early Grubb Street work. There are representations of various forms in Johnson's unique and powerful style, where elegance is reckoned as a "function of benevolence." Johnson's apparent terror of death and his resultant determination to let no talent lodge in him useless, was according to Fussell, a constant goad to write (which he hated to do), although this may be an over-emphasis. Fussell's finest moments come in his explication of the Lives, a happy confident leap amid a montage of Johnson's contradictions, and he exits in a buccaneer baroque fashion: "Johnson's species (sic) in the Lives is the writer as representative man. . . obliged to adhere to genres. . . he has not devised; tormented by the hunger of imagination. . . : and finally carried away by the very stream of time which it has been his ironic ambition to shape, and by shaping to arrest." A fair and fine tribute to a dark and aggravating presence.
Pub Date: March 10, 1971
ISBN: 039330258X
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1971
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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