Next book

THE FRIENDSHIP

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

Though the menu is familiar, lovers of the early Romantics will enjoy the meal.

A close and charitable look at the rise and fall of one of the most famous friendships in literary history.

Sisman, who left the publishing business to write literary history (Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, 2001), traverses a portion of a vast but well-explored terrain with his latest. Coleridge, Wordsworth—is there something to add to what already resides in the myriad volumes about these two men, their writings, their coevals, their times? Not a lot. Sisman does offer some new perspectives, but mostly this is a summary—a brisk, informed and generally disinterested one (he avoids partisanship)—of the relationship between two extraordinary men. Early in their friendship, Coleridge began to recognize his friend’s superior abilities as a poet, and for years he urged Wordsworth to devote himself to a lengthy masterwork, The Recluse, which Wordsworth could never complete. Sisman does a fine job of rehearsing the stories of the birth of Lyrical Ballads (and the complications of its revisions and subsequent editions), of the closeness between Wordsworth and his devoted sister, Dorothy, of Coleridge’s miserable marriage to Sara, of his passion for another Sara (Hutchinson), of his decline into self-doubt and drugs and ill health. Sisman also shows plainly the growing professional frustrations of Wordsworth, whose early volumes were savaged by critics and who responded with what even his friends characterized as arrogance. Great literary names walk these pages: Godwin, Lamb, Hazlitt, Southey, De Quincey. The final chapters—chronicling the misunderstandings, jealousies, resentments, silences—make for emotional reading. The maps and illustrations (unseen) should be helpful; one wishes, as well, for a chronology.

Though the menu is familiar, lovers of the early Romantics will enjoy the meal.

Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2007

ISBN: 0-670-03822-9

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Next book

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Close Quickview