A devoted, respectful tribute.
A moving compilation of diary entries written during the course of an artistically fruitful three-decade partnership.
Playwright Harold Pinter died from cancer in 2008, soon after winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Historical biographer and novelist Fraser (Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, 2006, etc.) has edited her diary entries reflecting their compatible life together. Both were in their early 40s and married to other people when they met at a dinner party on Jan. 8, 1975. The two moved in “different worlds”—Fraser, a Catholic aristocrat by birth, was the wife of Tory MP Hugh Fraser, had six children and some years before published her first bestselling history, Mary Queen of Scots; and Pinter, the only child of a Jewish working-class family, had already become wealthy and famous since his 1960 play The Caretaker, and was married to actress Vivien Merchant, with whom he had a son. Their coup de foudre sundered their respective marriages; Vivien descended into alcoholism, Hugh into blithe bachelorhood, as characterized by Fraser, and neither lived many years longer. Pinter embarked on works such as Betrayal, Moonlight and an increasingly political vision; she on novels and celebrated biographies of Charles II and Marie Antoinette, among others. Together they buzzed among the celebrity bees of the age, from London to New York, captured in precious cameos—e.g., Samuel Beckett, Laurence Olivier, Salman Rushdie, Jackie Kennedy, then-child actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Vaclav Havel. They married in 1980, and Fraser reveals delightful details of their writerly life together, such as that Pinter only wrote when struck by inspiration and liked to read his work out loud, and both were voracious readers. Throughout, she celebrates her love for Pinter. “I always wanted to know a genius,” she writes. “I was lured, compelled by a superior force, something drawn out of me by him, which was simply irresistible.”
A devoted, respectful tribute.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-53250-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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