In this bicentennial of the failed United Irishmen rising against Britain, a charismatic Protestant aristocrat, soldier, and radical politician receives the extended treatment usually given to the rebellion’s legendary Wolfe Tone. Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763—98) was the son of the senior peer of Ireland; his mother, Emily, was a member of the Lennox family that Tillyard chronicled in Aristocrats (1994). After serving with the British army in the American Revolution, Lord Edward grew increasingly alienated from his ruling-class milieu and committed to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality (he was a friend of the radicals Charles James Fox and Tom Paine). As a member of the Irish Parliament, he came to believe that incremental freedom would never rescue Ireland from the injustice, poverty, and sectarianism that had become rife under British rule. Despite his wish to concede leadership to others in the secret revolutionary group the United Irishmen, he became a leading figure in the gathering anti-English agitation because of his military background, conspicuous bravery, wealth, ties to revolutionary France, and easy familiarity with Irish peasants. In May 1798, however, having become the most hunted man in Dublin, Lord Edward was betrayed and mortally wounded while being captured. His death turned the rebellion into a doomed series of uncoordinated uprisings. Tillyard quotes copiously from letters to and from her hero, vividly bringing to life the privileged background he rejected. However, she is less successful in depicting the course of his life as —logical, consistent, and tragically inexorable.— This failure results partly from his passionate nature, partly from Tillyard’s inability to penetrate deeply into Lord Edward’s Enlightenment ideals. Nevertheless, with a near-novelistic depiction of scene, Tillyard recreates the physical and emotional world of this reckless, almost Byronic aristocrat with great flair. Lord Edward materializes here as not just an Irish martyr, but as a remarkable figure far in advance of his turbulent times. (8 pages b&w photos, 4 pages color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-12383-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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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