A candid, intimate and touching portrait of the author's masculine forebears, composed in nimble prose.
A sprightly memoir about the succession of cranky, writerly Waugh men, concluding with the author (born 1963).
The most famous Waugh was of course Evelyn, author of Brideshead Revisted and many other novels, who died in 1966. Older brother Alec was notorious for his novel The Loom of Youth (1917); son Auberon (Alexander’s father) was a well-known journalist for the Daily Telegraph for nearly 40 years. Alexander, member of the family’s fourth generation of authors and critics, writes frankly and sweepingly of the often deeply ambivalent feelings between Waugh fathers and sons. He begins with “the Brute”: sadistic, Victorian Dr. Alexander Waugh, a country doctor who bullied son Arthur for his asthmatic weakness. Arthur, in turn, grew passionate about dramatics and a literary career, established himself in London and was eventually noted for his literary criticism and work as a managing director of Chapman and Hall. The careers of Arthur’s two sons form the most compelling chapters here; favorite Alec and irritable Evelyn are portrayed in knee-slapping good stories that spare no one’s feelings. Expelled from Sherborne for homosexual activity, Alec enjoyed some early literary successes but was forced to recognize that his younger brother was the better writer. Evelyn, despite great professional and financial successes, never quite won his father’s love, and indeed waged continual, patricidal literary war against him. Auberon, Evelyn’s first-born son, developed a hatred for discipline and became an accomplished liar. He died in 2001, and Alexander describes his final days with great pathos: “I had not kissed my father since I was twelve years old and had never said ‘I love you’ to him, even as a boy…we never, in all our time together, had a single serious conversation. He had not trained me for it.”
A candid, intimate and touching portrait of the author's masculine forebears, composed in nimble prose.Pub Date: May 29, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52150-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
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
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