A well-researched account of a literary dust-up marred by superficial writing.
A former Moscow correspondent chronicles one of the most famous literary spats of the 20th century.
In 1939, the composer Nicolas Nabokov rented a house on Cape Cod across the street from Edmund Wilson, the Russophile editor of the New Republic, and asked for a favor: could he help his cousin, Vladimir, recently arrived from St. Petersburg, secure some reviewing gigs? Wilson obliged. He and Vladimir became friends, even though Wilson failed to convince the younger man—whom Boston Globe columnist Beam (American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church, 2014, etc.) calls “the twentieth century’s Trickster King”—to abandon his love of puns and anagrams. After two decades of friendship, however, Wilson wrote a “generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job” about Nabokov’s massive four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Years of public bickering followed. Beam does an excellent job of depicting the growing strain between the two men, brought on in part by the huge success of Lolita compared to Wilson’s own attempt at a salacious novel, Memoirs of Hecate County. The pages devoted to the back and forth among Nabokov, Wilson, and other luminaries who weighed in on the Onegin contretemps are great fun. But the flippant tone of Beam’s writing—note the book’s subtitle—may rankle some readers. Nabokov was “a quick-on-the-uptake student at the Edmund Wilson Academy of Not Taking Sh*t from Publishers.” Spendthrift Wilson and money “were never destined to share a taxicab.” Nabokov fans are “deep-dish Nabokovians.” When Wilson argued about Russian prosody, he “revisited Gerundistan.” After he quotes Nabokov’s dismissal of lesser Onegin translations, Beam reprimands him with, “But really, Vladimir.” Prose that calls attention to itself didn’t always serve Nabokov well, and it doesn’t work here, either.
A well-researched account of a literary dust-up marred by superficial writing.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87022-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
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
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