An intelligent, sympathetic portrait of a complicated, even tortured writer who calls for fresh readers.
A fine reappraisal of the work of the Victorian novelist and dear friend to Henry James.
In this comprehensive, fleshed-out biography, author Rioux (English/Univ. of New Orleans; Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America, 2004, etc.) works back from Woolson’s suicide in 1894 to consider the enormous obstacles a woman writer in her era had to overcome in the sexist American literary culture. Woolson’s work was largely overshadowed by her contemporary and frequent companion James, and Rioux does not speculate idly about their relationship outside of their mutual devotion to their work, loneliness, and James’ essential “underlying disdain for women writers.” Indeed, Woolson grasped that disdain and even—painful as it is to modern readers—subsumed the sexist strictures of the time, declaring to James, “a woman, after all, can never be a complete artist.” Yet the two novelists were serializing their work in periodicals at the same time and similarly employed intelligent, thwarted, unrealized female characters in their fiction. A product of a large Cleveland family of mostly daughters—many of whom died tragically in their youth—Woolson saw firsthand the wasted fates of mothers and wives. She narrowly “escaped” (her word) a similar fate in marriage in her late 20s before choosing the writing life over teaching (the two professions available to single women), partly due to her middle name—James Fenimore Cooper was her great uncle. Woolson was determined to make a living by her pen, and she was able to support her mother and sister, moving constantly and eventually settling in Venice—although she was plagued by depression and ill health for much of her life. Rioux delineates the toll her writing ambition took on her and how, curiously, she hid her lethal literary drive from her friend James.
An intelligent, sympathetic portrait of a complicated, even tortured writer who calls for fresh readers.Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24509-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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