War, sex, friendship, betrayal, celebrity, rivalry, jealousy, idealism, foolishness and foppery—all this and more gather in...
Vaill (Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, 2006, etc.) follows a handful of characters (some are celebrities, some not) through the Spanish Civil War.
Subdividing her chapters by months, the author sets herself a difficult task: chasing Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Arturo Barea, Ilsa Kulcsar, Endre Friedmann (aka Robert Capa) and Gerta Pohorylle through the political and military chaos in Spain and elsewhere. Among the many popping up for cameos are Stephen Spender, Eric Blair (George Orwell) and John Dos Passos. Although it will be difficult for readers to turn their eyes away from the power couple (Hemingway and Gellhorn), Vaill does a good job of getting us deeply interested in the lives, experiences and, sadly, the deaths of some of the others. It helps her cause, too, that she elected to portray Hemingway in the most unflattering (and deserved?) light. We see his pettiness and his professional jealousy; we watch him swinging away at people in bars. Early in the conflict, we also see Capa and other photographers staging acting scenes (including, in a way, his famous image of a wounded warrior in midfall on a Spanish hillside) and Gellhorn fabricating a story about a lynching in the American South. It was certainly a different time in journalism. Vaill shows us images of incredible courage—especially Capa’s—and political intrigue (the Russians were especially perfidious—and Stalin’s reeking presence) and the absolute confusion that reigned. (The truth concealed itself quite well.) She also points us toward Hitler, and we witness his invasion of Austria and his designs on Czechoslovakia. A touching epilogue records the deaths of all her principals.
War, sex, friendship, betrayal, celebrity, rivalry, jealousy, idealism, foolishness and foppery—all this and more gather in the lobby of Madrid’s Hotel Florida.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-17299-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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