“I long for and seek after,” one fragment reads, serving well as an epigraph for this evocative book about a mysterious...
From fragmentary sources, a classicist reconstructs the life and times of the poet Plato called the 10th Muse.
Biographical facts about Sappho “are few and often subject to dispute,” acknowledges Freeman (Classics/Luther Coll.; Oh My Gods: A Modern Retelling of Greek Myths, 2012, etc.), and of nine scrolls of her poetry once housed in the ancient Library of Alexandria, only a few poems remain, some represented by a single word. Since a biography is impossible, the author looks to literary, artistic, and archaeological sources to investigate women’s experiences on the island of Lesbos in the late seventh to early sixth centuries B.C.E. The result is an authoritative, insightful narrative that looks at childhood, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, religion, and death to speculate about the realities of Sappho’s life. Freeman is certain that Sappho was married, “since the single life was simply not a viable option, especially for a woman” and since weddings emerged as a theme in her poetry. She was a mother, with a beloved daughter, Cleis, with whom she apparently lived in her old age. Beyond these deductions, Freeman offers surprising details about marriage customs (brides, for example, were usually at least 15 years younger than husbands), beliefs about conception and pregnancy (“women were simply incubators for men,” contributing nothing to conception), and women’s religious practices. Among hundreds of deities, the goddess Demeter was singled out for women’s worship, a practice, the author remarks, that “naturally aroused the discomfort of men accustomed to keeping women in their place.” Sexuality was a fluid concept in ancient Greece, with no word for “homosexual,” and male same-sex relationships were tolerated more than lesbian relationships. From her descriptions of erotic love, Freeman concludes that Sappho preferred women. Appended to the biography are the author’s translations of nearly 200 pieces.
“I long for and seek after,” one fragment reads, serving well as an epigraph for this evocative book about a mysterious ancient literary figure.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24223-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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