Nowhere near a cut-and-dried case, but plausible enough to leave readers—particularly those who found Peter Pan disquieting...
Adopting both the general notion and the melodramatic tone of D.H. Lawrence’s famous comment—“J.M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die”—Dudgeon (Our East End: Memories of Life in Disappearing Britain, 2008, etc.) presents the author of Peter Pan as a crippled soul who deliberately manipulated the lives and psyches of numerous associates and children.
Why? Not for sex—the author dismisses this notion out of hand—but in compensation for a childhood so “bereft of wonder” that he was left incapable of any genuine ability to love. How? Through hypnosis and autosuggestion, techniques inspired by Svengali, the villain in George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby. Who? Dudgeon trots in a large company over whom Barrie “extend[ed] his malign power,” including but not limited to the five “Lost Boys” of that same Du Maurier’s daughter Sylvia, his son Gerald Du Maurier, Gerald’s daughter Daphne and, for variety, the doomed explorer Robert Scott. All did indeed die young, commit suicide and/or suffer lifelong emotional problems. Furthermore, the author ups the body count by suggesting that Barrie played a hushed-up role in the accidental death of his older brother in childhood. The evidence for this, as for Dudgeon’s entire thesis, is at best circumstantial. Aside from sure proof, presented in a pair of photos, that Barrie altered Sylvia’s will to give him guardianship over the boys, it’s all based on suppositions, uneasy comments or dark hints by contemporaries, bald guesses and supposedly telling parallels between fleshly characters and those in either Barrie’s works or various of the Du Mauriers’ “autobiographical psycho-novels.”
Nowhere near a cut-and-dried case, but plausible enough to leave readers—particularly those who found Peter Pan disquieting (which it is)—wondering.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-063-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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